Silently evolving here was the attitude before God that Paul explored in his theology of justification: These are people who do not flaunt their achievements before God. They do not stride into God's presence as if they were partners able to engage with him on an equal footing; they do not lay claim to a reward for what they have done. These are people who know that their poverty also has an interior dimension; they are lovers who simply want to let God bestow his gifts upon them and thereby to live in inner harmony with God's nature and word. The saying of Saint Therese of Lisieux about one day standing before God with empty hands, and holding them open to him, describes the spirit of these poor ones of God: They come with empty hands; not with hands that grasp and clutch, but with hands that open and give and thus are ready to receive from God's bountiful goodness.
Because this is the case, there is no opposition between Matthew, who speaks of the poor in spirit, and Luke, in whose Gospel the Lord addresses the "poor" without further qualification. Some have claimed that Matthew took the concept of poverty that Luke originally understood in a totally material and real way, spiritualized it, and so robbed it of its radicalism. Yet anyone who reads the Gospel of Luke knows perfectly well that it is he who introduces us to the "poor in spirit"--the sociological group, one might say, among whom Jesus' earthly journey, and that of his message, could begin. Conversely, it is clear that Matthew remains completely in the tradition of piety reflected in the Psalms and so in the vision of the true Israel expressed in them.
The poverty of which this tradition speaks is never a purely material phenomenon. Purely material poverty does not bring salvation, though of course those who are disadvantaged in this world may count on God's goodness in a particular way. But the heart of those who have nothing can be hardened, poisoned, evil--interiorly full of greed for material things, forgetful of God, covetous of external possessions.
On the other hand, the poverty spoken of here is not a purely spiritual attitude, either. Admittedly, not everyone is called to the radicalism with which so many true Christians--from Anthony, father of monasticism, to Francis of Assisi, down to the exemplary poor of our era--have lived and continue to live their poverty as a model for us. But, in order to be the community of Jesus' poor, the Church has constant need of the great ascetics. She needs the communities that follow them, living out poverty and simplicity so as to display to us the truth of the Beatitudes. She needs them to wake everyone up to the fact that possession is all about service, to contrast the culture of affluence with the culture of inner freedom, and thereby to create the conditions for social justice as well.
The Sermon on the Mount is not a social program per se, to be sure. But it is only when the great inspiration it gives us vitally influences our thought and our action, only when faith generates the strength of renunciation and responsibility for our neighbor and for the whole of society--only then can social justice grow, too. And the Church as a whole must never forget that she has to remain recognizably the community of God's poor. Just as the Old Testament opened itself through God's poor to renewal in the New Covenant, so too any renewal of the Church can be set in motion only through those who keep alive in themselves the same resolute humility, the same goodness that is always ready to serve.
Thus far, we have considered only the first half of the first Beatitude, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." In both Matthew and Luke the promise assigned to them is as follows: "Theirs [yours] is the Kingdom of God [the Kingdom of heaven]" (Mt 5:3; Lk 6:20). "Kingdom of God" is the basic category of Jesus' message; here it becomes part of the Beatitudes. This context is important for a correct understanding of this much disputed term. We have already seen this in our examination of the meaning of the expression "Kingdom of God," and we will need to recall it frequently in the course of our further reflections.
But it may be a good idea--before we continue our meditation on the text--to turn for a moment to the figure whom the history of faith offers us as the most intensely lived illustration of this Beatitude: Francis of Assisi. The saints are the true interpreters of Holy Scripture. The meaning of a given passage of the Bible becomes most intelligible in those human beings who have been totally transfixed by it and have lived it out. Interpretation of Scripture can never be a purely academic affair, and it cannot be relegated to the purely historical. Scripture is full of potential for the future, a potential that can only be opened up when someone "lives through" and "suffers through" the sacred text. Francis of Assisi was gripped in an utterly radical way by the promise of the first Beatitude, to the point that he even gave away his garments and let himself be clothed anew by the bishop, the representative of God's fatherly goodness, through which the lilies of the field were clad in robes finer than Solomon's (cf. Mt 6:28-29). For Francis, this extreme humility was above all freedom for service, freedom for mission, ultimate trust in God, who cares not only for the flowers of the field but specifically for his human children. It was a corrective to the Church of his day, which, through the feudal system, had lost the freedom and dynamism of missionary outreach. It was the deepest possible openness to Christ, to whom Francis was perfectly configured by the wounds of the stigmata, so perfectly that from then on he truly no longer lived as himself, but as one reborn, totally from and in Christ. For he did not want to found a religious order: He simply wanted to gather the People of God to listen anew to the word--without evading the seriousness of God's call by means of learned commentaries.
By creating the Third Order, though, Francis did accept the distinction between radical commitment and the necessity of living in the world. The point of the Third Order is to accept with humility the task of one's secular profession and its requirements, wherever one happens to be, while directing one's whole life to that deep interior communion with Christ that Francis showed us. "To own goods as if you owned nothing" (cf. 1 Cor 7:29ff.)--to master this inner tension, which is perhaps the more difficult challenge, and, sustained by those pledged to follow Christ radically, truly to live it out ever anew--that is what the third orders are for. And they open up for us what this Beatitude can mean for all. It is above all by looking at Francis of Assisi that we see clearly what the words "Kingdom of God" mean. Francis stood totally within the Church, and at the same time it is in figures such as he that the Church grows toward the goal that lies in the future, and yet is already present: The Kingdom of God is drawing near....
Let us pass over for the time being the second Beatitude listed in Matthew's Gospel and go directly to the third, which is closely connected with the first: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth" (Mt 5:5). Some translations render the Greek word praus as "nonviolent" rather than "meek." This is a narrowing of the Greek term, which carries a great wealth of tradition. The third Beatitude is practically a Psalm citation: "The meek shall possess the land" (Ps 37:11). The word praus in the Greek Bible translates the Hebrew anawim, which was used to designate God's poor, of whom we spoke in connection with the first Beatitude. The first and third Beatitudes thus overlap to a large extent; the third Beatitude further illustrates an essential aspect of what is meant by poverty lived from and for God.
The focus is enlarged, though, when we take account of a few other texts in which the same word occurs. In Numbers 12:3 we read: "Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all men that were on the face of the earth." One cannot help thinking of Jesus' saying, "Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am meek and lowly in heart" (Mt 11:29). Christ is the new, the true Moses (this idea runs through the whole Sermon on the Mount). In him there appears the pure goodness that above all befits the great man, the ruler.
We are led even deeper when we consider another set of interconnections between the Old and New Testaments based around the word praus, "meek." In Zech 9:9-10, we read: "Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble [meek] and riding on an ass, on a colt the foal of an ass. He will cut off the chariot from
Ephraim...the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth." This passage announces a poor king--a king whose rule does not depend on political and military might. His inmost being is humility and meekness before God and men. In this he is the exact opposite of the great kings of the world. And a vivid illustration is the fact that he rides on an ass--the mount of the poor, the counterimage of the chariot that he rejects. He is the king of peace--and by God's power, not his own.
There is a further element: His kingdom is universal, it embraces the whole earth. "From sea to sea"--behind this expression is the image of a flat earth surrounded on all sides by the waters, and it thus gives us an inkling of the world-spanning extent of his dominion. Karl Elliger is therefore correct when he says that "through all the fog" we do "glimpse with surprising distinctness the figure of the one who has now really brought the whole world the peace that passes all understanding. He has done so in filial obedience: by renouncing violence and accepting suffering until he was released from it by the Father. And so from now on he builds up his kingdom simply by the word of peace" (Das Alte Testament Deutsch, 24/25, p. 151). Only against this backdrop do we grasp the full scope of the account of Palm Sunday, only now do we understand what it means when Luke (and, in a similar vein, John) tells us that Jesus ordered his disciples to procure him a she-ass and her foal: "This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet, saying, 'Tell the daughter of Zion, "Behold, your king is coming to you, [meek] and mounted on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of an ass" '"(Mt 21:4-5; cf. Jn 12:15).
Unfortunately some translations obscure these interconnections by using different words to translate praus. Within the wide arc of these texts--from Numbers 12 through Zechariah 9 to the Beatitudes and the account of Palm Sunday--we can discern the vision of Jesus, the king of peace, who throws open the frontiers separating the peoples and creates a domain of peace "from sea to sea." Through his obedience he calls us into this peace and plants it in us. The word meek belongs, on one hand, to the vocabulary of the People of God, to the Israel that in Christ has come to span the whole world. At the same time, it is a word related to kingship, which unlocks for us the essence of Christ's new kingship. In this sense, we could say that it is both a Christological word and an ecclesiological one. In any case, it is a word that calls us to follow the one whose entry into Jerusalem mounted on an ass reveals the whole essence of his kingship.
In the text of Matthew's Gospel, this third Beatitude is associated with the promise of the land: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the land." What does this statement mean? Hope for the land is part of the original content of the promise to Abraham. During Israel's years of wandering in the desert, the promised land is always envisaged as the goal of the journey. In exile Israel waits for the return to the land. We must not overlook, however, that the promise of the land is clearly about something far greater than the mere idea of possessing a piece of ground or a national territory in the sense that every people is entitled to do.
The main issue in the foreground of the struggle for liberation prior to Israel's exodus from Egypt is the right to freedom of worship, the people's right to their own liturgy. As time went by, it became increasingly clear that the promise of the land meant this: The land was given as a space for obedience, a realm of openness to God, that was to be freed from the abominations of idolatry. The concept of obedience to God, and so of the right ordering of the earth, is an essential component of the concept of freedom and the concept of the land. From this perspective, the exile, the withdrawal of the land, could also be understood: The land had itself become a zone of idolatry and disobedience, and the possession of the land had therefore become a contradiction.
A new and positive understanding of the diaspora could also arise from this way of thinking: Israel was scattered across the world so that it might everywhere create space for God and thus fulfill the purpose of creation suggested by the first creation account (cf. Gen 1:1-2, 4): The Sabbath is the goal of creation, and it shows what creation is for. The world exists, in other words, because God wanted to create a zone of response to his love, a zone of obedience and freedom. Step by step, as Israel accepted and suffered all the vicissitudes of its history as God's people, the idea of the land grew in depth and breadth, shifting its focus increasingly away from national possession and increasingly toward the universality of God's claim to the earth.
Of course, there is a sense in which the interplay between "meekness" and the promise of the land can also be seen as a perfectly ordinary piece of historical wisdom: Conquerors come and go, but the ones who remain are the simple, the humble, who cultivate the land and continue sowing and harvesting in the midst of sorrows and joys. The humble, the simple, outlast the violent, even from a purely historical point of view. But there is more. The gradual universalization of the concept of the land on the basis of a theology of hope also reflects the universal horizon that we found in the promise of Zechariah: The land of the king of peace is not a nation-state--it stretches from "sea to sea" (Zech 9:10). Peace aims at the overcoming of boundaries and at the renewal of the earth through the peace that comes from God. The earth ultimately belongs to the meek, to the peaceful, the Lord tells us. It is meant to become the "land of the king of peace." The third Beatitude invites us to orient our lives toward this goal.
Every eucharistic assembly is for us Christians a place where the king of peace reigns in this sense. The universal communion of Christ's Church is thus a preliminary sketch of the world of tomorrow, which is destined to become a land of Jesus Christ's peace. In this respect, too, the third Beatitude harmonizes closely with the first: It goes some way toward explaining what "Kingdom of God" means, even though the claim behind this term extends beyond the promise of the land.
With the foregoing remarks, we have already anticipated the seventh Beatitude: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God" (Mt 5:9). A few observations on the main points of this fundamentally important saying of Jesus may therefore suffice. First of all, we glimpse the events of secular history in the background. In his infancy narrative, Luke had already suggested the contrast between this child and the all-powerful Emperor Augustus, who was renowned as the "savior of the universal human race" and as the great peacemaker. Caesar had already claimed the title "bringer of world peace." The faithful in Israel would be reminded of Solomon, whose Hebrew name is rooted in the word for "peace" (shalom). The Lord had promised David: "I will give peace and quiet to Israel in his days.... He shall be my son, and I will be his father" (1 Chron 22:9f.). This brings to the fore a connection between divine Sonship and the kingship of peace: Jesus is the Son, and he is truly Son. He is therefore the true "Solomon"--the bringer of peace. Establishing peace is part of the very essence of Sonship. The seventh Beatitude thus invites us to be and do what the Son does, so that we ourselves may become "sons of God."
This applies first of all in the context of each person's life. It begins with the fundamental decision that Paul passionately begs us to make in the name of God: "We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God" (2 Cor 5:20). Enmity with God is the source of all that poisons man; overcoming this enmity is the basic condition for peace in the world. Only the man who is reconciled with God can also be reconciled and in harmony with himself, and only the man who is reconciled with God and with himself can establish peace around him and throughout the world. But the political context that emerges from Luke's infancy narrative as well as here in Matthew's Beatitudes indicates the full scope of these words. That there be peace on earth (cf. Lk 2:14) is the will of God and, for that reason, it is a task given to man as well. The Christian knows that lasting peace is connected with men abiding in God's eudokia, his "good pleasure." The struggle to abide in peace with God is an indispensable part of the struggle for "peace on earth"; the former is the source of the criteria and the energy for the latter. When men lose sig
ht of God, peace disintegrates and violence proliferates to a formerly unimaginable degree of cruelty. This we see only too clearly today.
Let us go back to the second Beatitude: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted" (Mt 5:4). Is it good to mourn and to declare mourning blessed? There are two kinds of mourning. The first is the kind that has lost hope, that has become mistrustful of love and of truth, and that therefore eats away and destroys man from within. But there is also the mourning occasioned by the shattering encounter with truth, which leads man to undergo conversion and to resist evil. This mourning heals, because it teaches man to hope and to love again. Judas is an example of the first kind of mourning: Struck with horror at his own fall, he no longer dares to hope and hangs himself in despair. Peter is an example of the second kind: Struck by the Lord's gaze, he bursts into healing tears that plow up the soil of his soul. He begins anew and is himself renewed.
Ezekiel 9:4 offers us a striking testimony to how this positive kind of mourning can counteract the dominion of evil. Six men are charged with executing divine punishment on Jerusalem--on the land that is filled with bloodshed, on the city that is full of wickedness (cf. Ezek 9:9). Before they do, however, a man clothed in linen must trace the Hebrew letter tau (like the sign of the Cross) on the foreheads of all those "who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in the city" (Ezek 9:4). Those who bear this mark are exempted from the punishment. They are people who do not run with the pack, who refuse to collude with the injustice that has become endemic, but who suffer under it instead. Even though it is not in their power to change the overall situation, they still counter the dominion of evil through the passive resistance of their suffering--through the mourning that sets bounds to the power of evil.
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