Jesus (25 page)

A few of the groups Jesus praises would still win praise today—for example, the “pure in heart.” The Greek is
katharoi tē cardia
, literally, the “clean of heart.” The word had multiple meanings in Jesus's time: clean, like recently washed clothes; clean, like grain that has had impurities removed; or clean, like a substance that has never been adulterated—like wine that has not been mixed with water.
¹¹
Mostly this term relates to pure motives rather than to ritual or sexual purity. People not acting out of excessive self-interest, whose inner and outer lives correspond, like those in the Psalms with “clean hands and pure hearts,” are the subject of his blessing.
¹²
It's a challenge to be “clean of heart,” because even in our most selfless moments we may act from mixed motives. But the general meaning—a person of integrity—would be praised today. So if Jesus were to say today, “Blessed are people of integrity,” he would probably get a hearty round of applause.

Other lines might be met by stony silence. Even when we distinguish between groups promised consolation or justice (the poor, the hungry, mourners) and groups praised for their behavior (the pure in heart, peacemakers, those who hunger for righteousness), Jesus's words disturb, because many of those Jesus singles out for praise are sneered at today. Think about our common perceptions of some of these groups.

Let's start with the poor. Often today they are seen as lazy, an embarrassment to society, or simply nonentities. By the way, the word Luke uses—
ptōchoi
—may refer not simply to the indigent or even the working poor, but to something more specific—beggars. The word is connected to the root
ptōssein
, meaning to crouch or cower, the way that many beggars do. Perhaps to reclaim the full power of Jesus's words we can hear him say, “Blessed are the beggars.” Have you ever walked past a group of homeless people and thought,
Blessed are they
?

How about the “poor in spirit”? Many Christians find it hard to appreciate this Beatitude, because almost any translation implies the opposite of what Jesus means. Several years ago during a Bible study class in a parish, I asked the group what they thought of when they heard the term “poverty of spirit.” A woman's hand shot up. “Someone who doesn't believe in God?” Paradoxically, to be poor in spirit is to be rich in faith. It indicates a person whose humility allows him or her to grasp the fundamental reliance on God. But even armed with that understanding, we sense that this Beatitude is still a threat. Humility is an unpopular virtue.

“Meek” may be an even more unpalatable word, conjuring up a simpering milquetoast, someone afraid to stand up for himself or herself, a person devoid of self-confidence and self-respect. When was the last time you heard someone say, “I really like that guy. He's so meek”?

What did Jesus mean? The Greek
praeis
is a complicated word with several possible meanings: self-control over one's passions; obedient or domesticated, as in an animal; or gentle. To understand Jesus's likely intent, it may help to look at the Hebrew that was the antecedent of the Greek. (Remember, like all the evangelists, Matthew had to translate Jesus's Aramaic or Hebrew into Greek.) Jesus probably had in mind the word
anawim
.
¹³
The
anawim
were not simply the meek, but those who were so poor, or weak, that they knew they depended utterly on God. So, poor
and
humble, a combination of two traits not highly prized today.
¹⁴

How about the merciful? The Greek
eleēmones
is the virtue of being generous or forgiving in excess of what is expected—that is, having mercy. But let's return again to the Hebrew or Aramaic. Jesus likely used a variant of the word
chesed
. That word popped up frequently in my Old Testament classes, and every time it did the professor would invariably say that “mercy” doesn't do it justice. Barclay describes this virtue as follows: “
Chesed, mercy
, means the ability to get right inside other people until we can see things with their eyes, think things with their minds, and feel things with their feelings.”
¹⁵

How often do we do that? Anyone who gives others the benefit of the doubt, tries to identify with someone on the opposite side of the theological or political spectrum, or forgives after having been horribly wronged is often seen as naive, lacking in self-respect, or, worse, a traitor. “You're forgiving
him
?” Today too, many respect not mercy, but revenge.

How about the peacemakers? Nearly all of us would praise those who work for peace. The Hebrew
shalom
, which Jesus likely used, means more than the absence of violence; it is the state of the highest good for all people. But there is about peacemaking a sense of the quixotic. Do you really think you can bring peace to your family, your workplace, your church, a country torn by violence? Most people would shake their heads and say, “Good luck!”

In popular thought, then, some of the groups named in the Beatitudes are thought of as lazy, cowardly, foolish, and gullible—basically, losers. In fact, one of the phrases in Luke's list refers specifically to those who are set aside: “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.” The word for “exclude” is
aphorizō
, and it has the sense of being set aside, excluded, marked off from others by a boundary—that is, “marginalized.” Embedded in the Beatitudes is the recognition that some disciples will be thought of as people who don't matter.

All this reminds me of my visits to the French shrine of Lourdes. Briefly put, Catholics believe that in 1858 the Virgin Mary appeared to a poor young girl named Bernadette Soubirous beside a filthy grotto near the Gave River in a small town in southern France. During one apparition, Bernadette was told to “bathe in the waters.” Not there, said the vision, when the young girl began walking toward the river. Confused, Bernadette started digging a few feet away from the riverbank. There she uncovered a bubbling spring of clear water, which proved to possess remarkable healing powers for some people in the town. Since then physicians have authenticated sixty-seven inexplicable cures of various illnesses in Lourdes, and the shrine attracts millions of pilgrims each year.

Every evening in Lourdes a huge procession draws as many as ten thousand people to pray the Rosary. Rain or shine, the procession begins by the river and ends in front of the massive gray church that now rises over the grotto. In the closing moments of the procession, the crowd gathers in a large plaza before the church. Then the crowd parts, like the Red Sea, to make way for the sick, for those who have journeyed to Lourdes for healing. Hundreds of men, women, and children—who suffer from the final stages of cancer, various forms of paralysis, and every variety of incurable disease—are pushed in wheelchairs and carts to the front of the crowd to receive a blessing. Some look on the edge of death; others lift their heads with difficulty, limbs twisted; others nestle in their mother's or father's arms. These are the
malades
, the sick.

In Lourdes, the sick come first. Never have I seen this without thinking about the Beatitudes. These are the ones who Jesus singles out in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere in his ministry: “The last will be first.”
¹⁶
The ones on the bottom are on top. The ones who are ignored are celebrated. The ones who are pushed aside are given pride of place. The ones in the back of the line get the best seats. Blessed are they.

T
HIS DOES NOT MEAN
that Jesus was making a blanket statement about the inherent goodness of poverty or mourning per se. We must, for example, distinguish between the voluntary poverty of the disciple and the involuntary poverty of the person struggling to make ends meet. Having worked with the poor in both the inner cities of America and the slums of Africa, I know that poverty in and of itself is not “blessed.” Likewise, Jesus is not saying that mourning day and night for the rest of your life is desirable. What he's saying is more subtle.

Consider his words “Blessed are the poor.” Besides reminding us that the poor are blessed by a God who promises justice for the oppressed, Jesus is also turning our attention to the way the poor live in relationship with God.

While one cannot overgeneralize about those who are poor, I can say this, based on my experience over the last twenty-five years: many people who live in poverty are more conscious of their reliance on God than are their wealthier counterparts. During my two years in Kenya, I noticed this many times. There the refugees with whom I worked taught me a great deal about God. Without wealth, status, or power, their natural dependence on God was ever before them. And the refugees would regularly express thanks to God for small blessings—a found coin, getting over a cold, a conductor forgetting to ask them for their bus fare. “God is good!” one Rwandese refugee would say whenever life went her way. Their almost constant, and constantly voiced, gratitude was a blessing for me—and a spiritual lesson.

So was their generosity. Almost to a person, the refugees were unbelievably generous with what little they had. Once I was invited to a Ugandan refugee's small shack in the slums of Nairobi for an afternoon visit. Loyce had been given a small grant from the Jesuit Refugee Service to purchase a sewing machine, so that she could work as a seamstress from her home. Upon my arrival, I discovered that Loyce had cooked a full meal with beef, peanuts, and rice, which must have cost her a week's earnings. When I protested, Loyce said that this was simple hospitality.

The next year, after returning to the States, I was invited to give a talk to a small group of wealthy people in a tony apartment in Manhattan around dinnertime. After speaking for an hour, I was offered a glass of water and a few crackers. Then the group—I'm not making this up—went out for dinner without inviting me along. “Good night, Father!”

I remembered my meal in the slums with Loyce. Ironically, the topic of my talk that night was life in East Africa.

We cannot lump together all the poor (or all the rich). Even categories like “the poor” and “the rich” are misleading. Not every poor person is grateful or generous. And grinding poverty is an evil. But Jesus of Nazareth, who had grown up in a poor village, knew that we can often learn much from the poor. Jesus's comments about poverty are frequent in the Gospels: over and over he asks us to care for the poor—it is a litmus test for admission into heaven—so it is always surprising to me when Christians set aside this teaching.
¹⁷
But Jesus is saying that more than helping the poor and more than working to combat the systems that keep them poor, we must
become
like them—in their simplicity, generosity, and dependence on God.

So we are not only to care for them, we are to become poor ourselves, to strip ourselves of all that keeps us from God. In this reliance on God, the poor are our models. And so blessed are they.

The Beatitudes are not just a promise of reward for those who suffer unjustly and a prediction of the turnabout of the status quo. They also paint a portrait of the person Jesus wants us to be.
¹⁸
Several of Jesus's themes in the Beatitudes are repeated elsewhere in the Gospels. “Blessed are the poor” means not simply that the indigent will be rewarded, but that simplicity of life is important. (“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
¹⁹
) “Blessed are the poor in spirit” means not simply that they will be rewarded, but that humility is important. (“The greatest among you will be your servant.”
²⁰
)

Jesus was inviting the multitudes, and us, not only to hear a promise of future reward to those who suffer, but to embody certain virtues now. In doing so we become the people he intends us to be, participate in his reign, and become his disciples. And so we are blessed.

A
S
I
SAT IN
the garden on the Mount of Beatitudes, I wondered,
What would it mean to live the Beatitudes?
A phrase that I once heard on a retreat came to mind: A Person of the Beatitudes. Since I first heard that expression, I've tried to become that person—humble, merciful, gentle, peacemaking, seeking justice for others—and have tried to move closer to the vision of personhood Jesus was describing. But I still have far to go.

It's obvious when you meet a Person of the Beatitudes. The most recent example is someone I met a few years ago, a young Jesuit who is, funny enough, named Luke, who worked with me at
America
magazine. Luke lives simply and tries to be poor. All Jesuits take vows of poverty, but Luke lives more simply than most, with very few possessions; and when I met him he had just completed a stint working with the poor on a Native American reservation in South Dakota. Luke was also meek (he never shouted or bullied people); poor in spirit (when I once suggested some major changes to an article he was writing, he accepted them willingly, eagerly, even cheerfully); and merciful (he thought nothing of spending his Christmas Eve driving an elderly Jesuit many miles to spend time with his family). Most of all, he hungered and thirsted for righteousness (Luke was an active member of the Catholic Worker movement).

One day Luke told me that he was fasting for a week. That weekend he was planning to attend a protest march for peace and had committed himself to eating no solids, only drinking juice, as a spiritual preparation. Beatitude-wise, that meant he was hungry too. I mentioned this to the person with whom he shared an office, who professed surprise. His office mate had no idea Luke was fasting. Had that been me, I would have probably found some way to make sure everyone knew! But a Person of the Beatitudes—poor, poor in spirit, meek, hungering for justice, peacemaking—doesn't need to do that.