The First Beatitude

How fortunate the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven
Mt 5:3

We may translate more graphically: ‘How fortunate those who beg for their life’s very breath!’ Thus it is that “my soul pants for you, O Lord.” (Ps 42:1). Panting and sighing for God with one’s life-breath is the whole occupation of “those of humble breath”. What Jesus here intends is an existence wholly dependent upon God’s mercy and providence. Before we can say anything we must take in breath, take in air from outside ourselves. “My mouth I opened and drew in breath, because I yearned for your commands” (Ps 118:131). We depend on God in the same way that our lungs and our voice depend on air.

To be thus radically dependent, to long for God in this way, is declared to be the greatest fortune and bliss. To cling to God with one’s whole being and have nothing to offer of one’s own is the highest fulfillment and ecstasy. Important, too, is the fact that the Lord does not “legislate” in the sense of proclaiming a new law that is then enforced and that people choose to put into practice or not. Rather, his proclamation takes the form of praises. God passes judgment upon a variety of human attitudes, and he finds these to be most in keeping with the desires of his Heart.

If the first Decalogue on Mount Sinai declared how far man is from being like God – because of the sin that continually condemns him – this new Decalogue proclaims how much man is, or can be, like God, how the unbridgeable distance between them can in fact be abolished through humility and interior poverty. But this approximation to God, this passing over into total resemblance of him, can only occur within man’s union with the God-man Jesus Christ, who is the one proclaiming the Beatitudes and who, by so doing, is inviting us to live them in imitation of himself. Here, instead of man praising God for his magnificence, it is God who is praising those who praise God with their lives, those who offer God a continual sacrifice from the altar of their spirit. The person who is “poor in spirit” is the one who unceasingly murmurs: “Have mercy on me, God, meritless though I am, you who created me from nothing” (Earnest Hello).

What is most striking in the second phrase of this First Beatitude is the present tense of the verb, by contrast to the future of most of the other Beatitudes. The expression is very strong: not only are those who have the spirit of the poor in the Kingdom, not only are they members of it. The text says unequivocally that the Kingdom belongs to them, which is to say that they are on a parity of status with the King himself. By their radical poverty of existence, they have been made royal as Jesus is royal, since he is the King who stripped himself of all things except obedience to the Father’s will.

The Beatitudes instill in us the fundamental attitude of self-forgetfulness and interior emptiness. What is asked of us is nothing less than receiving in an open and fruitful heart the grace of reconciliation with God, the grace, that is, of ourselves BECOMING the holiness of God in Christ, in St. Paul’s unsurpassable words (2Cor 5:20). This, and nothing else, is the whole content, intent, and finality of the Beatitudes.

FIRE OF MERCY, HEART OF THE WORD – Meditations on the Gospel According to Matthew, by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, PP 186-188