“Happy are those who are hopeless, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs.”
That’s how the Common English Bible translates “poor in spirit” and I think it’s a pretty great translation.
Because we get the Beatitudes wrong ALL THE TIME. So much of the commentary on the Beatitudes assumes they are essentially virtues. Good ways to be. Commendable states to seek. Which is telling, because it seems we cannot imagine God blessing someone unless they have somehow “deserved” it through their correct behavior or state of being. We tend to think of the Beatitudes as “good ways to be, for which we will be blessed.”
But the Beatitudes are not virtues. Not that virtues aren’t worth seeking. They clearly are, but the point of the Beatitudes is not the same as the point of the virtue lists in Ephesians or Colossians that tell believers how to live now that they find themselves in Christ (“Put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience”).
The Beatitudes aren’t prescriptions, they’re proclamations. Announcements of sheer grace; blessing for those who thought they were outside the circle of the chosen. Dallas Willard coined the term “hopeless unblessables” for these people who had been ground to dust under the boot of oppressive power and told repeatedly that they were the scum of the earth who deserved all the suffering they endured.
Jesus looks at these hopeless unblessables and says, “Guess what? You’re the salt of the earth. You’re the light of the world. You’ve inherited the abundance of the kingdom. You have encountered the blessing of God’s kingdom right here and now, despite your poverty of spirit, despite your timidity, despite every aspect of your condition that has been used as an explanation for keeping you away from blessing. God is bypassing that whole system and meeting you right here in the wilderness, away from the temple, and conferring the abundance and authority of his kingdom upon you.”
We’ve somehow managed to turn these grace-filled proclamations of good news for the marginalized into a bland, status-quo-reinforcing technology for blessing, a kind of prosperity gospel, insipid ways to methodically attempt to earn what God lavishes on us prodigally. How silly.
