Blessed Are...

Tradition calls these "The Beatitudes." I realized when I was studying this passage that I didn't know what the word "beatitude" meant. I've never heard anyone use it unless they were talking about this passage, or the parallel on in Luke.
So I looked it up, and here's what I found out: It comes from a Latin word 'beatus.' It means blessed, happy, or satisfied.
Beatus is the root of the English words beatify, beatific, and beatification. Beatification is one step in the Roman Catholic Church's process for designating someone as a saint. When a person has been beatified, they are referred to with the title, "The Blessed..."
The English word 'beatitude,' then, describes the condition of blessed-ness. This passage is called the Beatitudes because it's about blessed-ness - almost every sentence begins with 'blessed are...'

Who is blessed? - the poor in spirit, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness...
In Luke's gospel, these are simplified a bit. In Luke, Jesus says simply, 'blessed are you who are poor...,' and 'blessed are you who are hungry...'
Both gospels include 'Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you against you falsely on my account...'
Matthew includes some more also: Blessed are the meek... Blessed are the merciful... Blessed are the pure in heart... Blessed are the peacemakers... Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake...
These sound like excellent qualities to strive for, especially with the promises that come with them:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven... Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Do you feel like any of these apply to you? Or do they seem a little out of reach, like they mainly only apply to saintly people?

If you gave yourself a spirituality performance rating, say on a scale of maybe 1 to 4, what would it be? Let's say 4 is 'excellent,' 3 is 'fair,' maybe 2 is 'poor,' and 1 might be 'too low to rate.' Mother Theresa would probably be a 4. Where does that leave us? Maybe 2? Sometimes, maybe 3. Sometimes maybe 1.
If you'd put yourself at one or two listen to this first beatitude again.
Blessed are the poor in spirit...
What does this mean? It doesn't mean what I thought it did. I thought it meant something holy - the commentaries I read, the writer studied the word that was translated here as 'poor' and it means 'destitute' - it describes someone who's crouching down, begging, because they don't have anything at all and no way to get anything unless someone gives it to them.
If you're poor in spirit, you're spiritually destitute, and you're just hoping to make it through the day. You come up to the gate of heaven with the idea of asking for help - maybe not even for yourself, but when you see God walking up, He's so holy and so powerful-looking and so beautiful that there's no way you could speak to Him. You slip behind one of the pillars and crouch down. But as He gets closer, you're so desperate, you reach your hand out - maybe He'll see you and have some pity and at least drop you some scrap of blessing.
That's poor in spirit. Does it seem accurate to call that a condition of blessedness?
Blessed are the poor in spirir... Blessed are those who are so spiritually destitute and powerless to help themselves that they can only beg for God to have mercy on them - because He will. In Luke, Jesus tells a parable of a man who threw a banquet and invited a bunch of people to come, but they all started making excuses why they had more pressing things to do. So the man told his servant, "Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame... Go out to the roads and country lanes and make them come in, so that my house will be full."
It's not a bad thing to be poor in spirit; it's not even an unusual thing. Once you know it, though, the thing to do is find God's house and hang around it, so when He comes by, you can put out your hand, or when his servants come out looking for people to bring inside to the banquet, they'll grab you.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Another of these blessed conditions is for those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake. This group of people we might put on the high end of the 1-4 spirituality scale - people like the martyrs.
I think of Stephen being stoned to death while Saul (later the Apostle Paul) stood by holding the coats of the people who were stoning him. Later, Paul found himself in a position of begging God for mercy and following him to the point where he was also persecuted and died for his faith. How are these saintly people blessed for this sacrifice?
theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
I think it's interesting that these two groups receive the same blessing. The kingdom of heaven belongs to people who stand firm in the face of persecution. And the kingdom of heaven belongs to people who can only beg for mercy.
It reminds me of the parable about the landowner who hired people to go work in his vineyard. He hired some in the morning, found a few more at lunch-time, and a few more just before quitting time. Then, when it was time to pay everybody, he paid them all the same - a a full day's wage.
The guys who worked all day were mad about this, but he pointed out that it was his money and what business was it of theirs how he chose to spend it? He gave them a good wage, and he gave the latecomers a good wage. What's wrong with that? He can be generous if he wants to. I think this issue of blessedness is similar. Those described in the beatitudes are not blessed because they do more holy things than other people. Maybe the only holy thing they do is show up just before quitting time and ask God for mercy.
But they're blessed because God blesses them.
We're blessed because God blesses us.
So far, neither of these blessed conditions sound like something we'd want to be in - spiritually destitute, being persecuted. In fact, the others, the rest of these blessed conditions aren't really so nice-sounding either for people living inside them. What's it like to mourn, for instance? Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
So these conditions of blessedness, these beatitudes, are not just for really saintly people. They're for real saints, for us. They're not all categories we'd want to fall into, but it's a comfort to know that God blesses us when we are in these situations.

Given to Vidor Presbyterian