A reflection on Matthew 5:3 for Sunday, February 6, 2022 at Mosaic Baptist Church
One day as he saw the crowds gathering, Jesus went up on the mountainside and sat down. His disciples gathered around him, and he began to teach them.
“God blesses those who are poor and realise their need for him,
for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.”
Matthew 5:1-3 (NLT)
The opening of Jesus’ teaching mission in the Gospel of Matthew is stunning.
Here is not only a flipping of everything we understand about the world – or even about the Kingdom of Heaven. It is also a capsizing of our anthropocentric perspective of God.
Put simply, Jesus points to a God who is completely unlike us!
We have an alarming tendency to create God in our own – broken – image. Yet Jesus, as he sits his disciples down for this inaugural teaching session, is seeking to open their eyes, hearts and minds to the possibility that God does things in ways we can barely imagine.
The values of the Kingdom of Heaven are very unlike ours.
Perhaps this first beatitude – or blessing – is designed to jolt those first disciples into the kind of mindset that will be needed for this pilgrimage they have embraced. If so, it certainly achieves it’s intended outcome:
“God blesses those who are poor and realise their need for him,
for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.”
The word ptochoi, translated here as ‘poor’, makes reference to the lowest rung in the poverty hierarchy. These are the very least or the empty ones. Jesus is pointing to beggars and nobodies, while celebrating the freedom they enjoy and the Kingdom of Heaven example they are.
A bone-jolting, imagination sparking, introduction to the Kingdom of Heaven!
And yet, it would seem that Matthew has added ‘and realise their need of him’ as a sort of softening. In other more literal translations this phrase is rendered ‘in spirit’. Many believe Luke’s simpler and more confronting phrase ‘blessed are the poor’ (Luke 6:20) is most likely the original. James, in James 2:5, also makes strong links between poverty and the kingdom.
Matthew, however, is more concerned with the results of being ranked as the empty-in-spirit-ones. These are the ones who will ‘realise their need’ for God and find that the ‘Kingdom of Heaven is theirs’.
From his opening sentence, Jesus is challenging our very definition of success: those who are successful in the eyes of this world are not those who are successful in the eyes of God. True success involves the self-clarity of knowing that we are all in need of God.
Jesus invites us too be a people striving for the simplicity that sees our need of God.
In a world we are only now realising has embraced a perpetual-expansion mentality, Jesus is asking us to trustingly insist that there is – and we have – enough. As we look at the finite environmental resources around us, we are finally in a position to recognise the wisdom of Jesus’ words. There is enough – but only if we cease to worship at the shrine of greed and unlimited growth.
And lest we be tempted to wonder if God is asking something of us that is not revealed in the very heart of God-head – a thing God never does – let us consider the worship of the early church as found in Philippians 2:
Though he was God,
he did not think of equality with God
as something to cling to.
Instead, he gave up his divine privileges;
he took the humble position of a slave
and was born as a human being.
When he appeared in human form,
he humbled himself in obedience to God
and died a criminal’s death on a cross.
Therefore, God elevated him to the place of highest honor
and gave him the name above all other names,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue declare that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
(Philippians 2:6-11, NLT)
Yes, this inaugural Kingdom moment is calling us to worship the God of humility – and discover that this invites us into a completely different understanding of reality!
If we become what we worship we do well to learn to worship nowhere else!
Conversation Starters:
What do you think poverty of spirit implies? Does it point to an inner emptiness – or fullness? Does it indicate a freedom from reputation or a life beyond hierarchy games?
Could it be that poverty and simplicity are foundational to our understanding of the joy God is calling us into?
Where do you think you embrace simplicity well? Where do you expect to grow further in simplicity?
How does this first glimpse of the kingdom transform your understanding of worship?