Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
--Matthew 5:3 (NASB)
The first of Jesus’ beatitudes is also one of the most unsettling. It touches on one of the top things that matter to people—money—and in a way that, even not understanding the verse, we realize is reproachful.
There are two ways in which the verse is usually interpreted. The first is to truncate it, as is the parallel passage in Luke, leaving out the words “in spirit,” as if the unqualified version is to be preferred to the qualified. Would we also say that the instruction “Stop at the sign” is better than “Stop at the red, octagonal sign with the white letters ‘STOP’ written boldly upon it?”
Even if the two versions are different discourses, their meanings must be reconciled if we attribute any consistency to their author. It is possible that Matthew, from a bias of a former wealthy man, added the qualifications to the beatitudes about the poor himself, but given the historic validation for both gospels, I would guess that both passages are representations of the same oral tradition—Matthew presenting but a bit more of it (as he does at other occasions).
In any case, the truncated version is often then used to support the idea that the poor are somehow in a favored position with God. While we know that God is presented in scripture as adamant for the provision of the poor (usually almsgiving is the definitive expression of what the Bible calls “justice”), can we go on to assert that poverty is a blessed, a happy state? Practically every poor person I have known would disagree. Poverty sucks.
Sometimes poverty is additionally presented as a holier, idealized state, sort of like “the noble savage,” as if somehow the limitation of resources to do evil reduces the evil done. Again, I’ve noticed that the wealthy have no monopoly on materialism, self-indulgence, and cruelty. One of my most shocking memories, as a child in Pakistan, was being told how the limbs of the children we saw begging on the shoulder of the highway had been broken by their parents, the better to solicit sympathy.
The other way this verse is often interpreted is to skirt the issue of wealth entirely and to say the beatitude is really about humility. This leaves the Luke parallel verse in an interpretive vacuum, so one finds the most honest of those that hold this viewpoint attempting to skate close one interpretation without abandoning the safety of the other. Here is the classic commentator, Matthew Henry, on the passage:
These meek ones are happy, even in this world. Meekness promotes wealth, comfort, and safety, even in this world.
Sounds great. Only problem is the viewpoint runs completely untrue to experience and to faith properly viewed as a knowledgeable response rather than deliberate ignorance. Are Christians called to be meek? Then they ought to realize in advance that they will be bulldozed out of their money, houses, and peaceable living like the rest of the meek.
A third interpretation of the beatitude is available to us from the very first age of the Church, when the oral tradition Matthew and Luke were both describing was still fresh. Clement writes
…wealth with wrong desires <is> a deadly combination. In such a case, to lose the wealth would be a healthy alternative. To make the soul pure—that is, poor and bare—we need to focus on the next words of the Savior, “Come, follow me…”
Yet, some people are able to hold their… possessions simply as the gifts of God. They use their things to minister for the salvation of men. They thereby return them to God, who gave them. They know that they possess them more for the sake of their brothers than for themselves. They are the masters of their belongings, not the slaves… They don’t carry their possessions around in their soul, nor do they plan their life around their things…
Even if they sometimes need to be deprived of their things, they are able to cheerfully bear the removal of their belongings just as easily as they were able to enjoy their abundance. These are the ones who are blessed by the Lord. They are the ones he calls “poor in spirit.” They are the proper heirs of the kingdom of heaven.
--David W. Bercot, ed. The Pilgrim Road, pp. 84–85. 1991
In other words, actual wealth is quite immaterial to the question of whether one is “poor in spirit.” The real question is how attached one is to the goods a person has (or does not have). The denizens of the Kingdom of God minister for God’s glory whether they have anything to minister with or not. The blessing is the ability not to be mastered by whatever wealth wanders into one’s life but to rejoice in applying it the way God has gifted to the task God has set forth.
And I write “wandered” quite purposefully, because the earliest Christians universally viewed working to acquire wealth as pagan or wicked. As far as I can tell, what wealth they had was acquired before conversion or donated or inherited. The earliest Christians, like Paul, worked only to provide what they barely needed to do their true work bringing Salve to the world. And didn’t Christ himself warn against the idea of acquiring wealth in order to minister? “You fool,” says God, “This very night your soul is required.” And elsewhere it says that we will not be entrusted with more before demonstrating that we are faithful with less. Only those that prove they are really Children of the Father by a faith response, by working his Work, will be given His inheritance. And what would the earliest Christians have said about the idea that believers ought to exercise some purported “right” to material blessing? I strongly suspect that they would have said that whoever would believe this does not know Christ and has not come to Christ at all, or at the very least has not received basic training.
So we see that Matthew’s “qualification of the beatitude” is an attempt to better communicate Christ’s meaning: to have riches is not evil, but one must be independent of them, at least in spirit.
