Blessed are the Poor in Spirit

The First Beatitude

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for of them is the kingdom of the heavens. Matthew 5:3.

Many years ago I remember reading Oswald Chambers on this verse: “Blessed are the paupers in spirit” he rendered it. Since then, I’ve spent many years mulling over this verse and have taught the Sermon quite a few times.

Of all the teaching that Jesus gives in the Sermon on the Mount (and in the whole of Matthew’s gospel), why in the world would the first statement be “Blessed are the poor in spirit for of them is the kingdom of the heavens”? In this post, I’ll attempt an answer.

Poverty of Spirit

The first thing that I present in a new Greek class is the alphabet. Unless a student learns the Greek alphabet, he or she will never read Greek. It is the fundamental lesson.

Likewise, learning (the meaning of) the phrase “the poor in spirit” is the fundamental lesson for unlocking the lessons of the Sermon and for all of Jesus’s teachings.

What does it mean to be poor in spirit?

True physical poverty is the lack of means to survive without help. Infants and children are all poor because they cannot survive without adults.

Spiritual poverty is the inability to survive spiritually without help.

And that is exactly Jesus’s lesson.

The only thing I can bring to God is the acknowledgment that I have nothing to bring to God.

I am destitute.

I am poor.

I am blind.

I need help.

Poverty of spirit is the relentless pursuit of routing out any notion in my soul that I have any merit before God apart from His gracious work through Jesus on my behalf.

This is the first lesson to be learned before any of the rest of the Sermon makes sense. I have no hope of seeing clearly if I am blind to my blindness.

Jesus, author and finisher of my faith

There is a second lesson though. Jesus not only spoke the words of the Sermon, but he was the very embodiment of those words.

Jesus was the poorest in spirit. 

He is my example for what total dependence on God looks like.

The New Testament is replete with a theology of Jesus’s poverty of spirit. In Gospel of John over and over, Jesus speaks of his dependence on the Father for all he does or says. Paul succinctly put it this way: “For you know the gift of our Lord Jesus Christ, that for you, he, though rich, took on poverty, so that you by his poverty might be rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9), and less succinctly this way:

Being in the form of God, he did not consider equality with God something to be held onto, but he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in the sameness of humans and being found in appearance as a human, he became obedient unto death, even death of a cross (Philippians 2:6-8).

In Matthew itself Jesus displayed his poverty in taking on baptism by John, and later says to his disciples:

Come to me all who labor and are burdened down and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am humble and lowly of heart (Matthew 11:28-29).

Jesus relentlessly pursued utter dependence on his Father, so that he might be the perfect conduit for the Father’s love to us—all the way to the cross.

…for of them is the kingdom of the heavens

The poor in spirit, those who realize they have nothing to bring to God, are the ones who inhabit God’s realm. They are blessed because God has graciously taken these people to himself to give them spiritual riches beyond description—because they admitted they had nothing.

The most difficult step anyone can make is admitting that they are not a god, maybe not in those words, but admitting that I am not in control of my own destiny, that we humans cannot through science or whatever control the world we live in, that we cannot control death, or so many other things that flow out of our pride and arrogance. But that step of admission that God is God and I am not, that God created me to worship Him and not myself, and that my life is totally dependent on His grace, is the step into poverty of spirit and into the realm of God’s rule.

When we learn that lesson, when we make that step, we are ready for the rest of the Sermon.

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An Invitation

Are you interested in learning New Testament Greek? I will be teaching an intensive course with 50 hours of live instruction via Zoom from June to August. Please contact me at jack.painter@gmail.com or go to https://www.rightonmission.org/intro-to-new-testament-greek for more information. I would love to have you!

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Observations on the Greek text

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Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι

This is an example of a verbless clause. All of the translations add “are” because we rarely use verbless clauses in English. Though not common, they do occur much more often in Greek. Notice that the subject οἱ πτωχοὶ and predicate μακάριοι agree in case, gender and number (nom. masc. pl.).

The other intriguing feature is that the predicate comes first. Μακάριοι is a predicate adjective. The normal order would be subject, then predicate: The poor in spirit (are) blessed. The question is why? A glance at the succeeding verses gives one possibility; μακάριοι begins each verse, thus besides its inherent meaning, it becomes a rhetorical feature of the list. Yet when we look throughout the New Testament and the Greek Old Testament, it is normal for μακάριοι to be first in the “blessed” sayings.

Finally,  τῷ πνεύματι is an example of a pure dative, which means there is no accompanying preposition. When this happens, we need to determine its usage. Is is “the poor to the spirit,” “the poor by the spirit,” “the poor for the spirit” or “the poor in the spirit.” Any are possible, but “in” makes the most sense. Greek speakers would naturally supply the sense.

What about the article? All of the translations leave the article out. The article indicates not “a” spirit but the particular spirit of a person, akin to soul, but more than soul. Of course, this word πνεύμα is also used for the Holy Spirit, but that would make little sense in the context.

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