The Curse of the Dollar-Shaped Plank

Sometimes I wonder if the reason we interpret "Blessed are the poor in spirit" to mean "Blessed are the people who feel poor on the inside" is because American culture is so oblivious to the sway that money holds over it that we feel we have no other choice but to read this beatitude in such a way that it makes no demands upon our lives. I mean, it's either that or we have to sell one of our Hummers (and that ain't gonna happen).

All cultures have their blind spots, including us. I mean, we have no problem recognizing the faults in other cultures, or in American culture of times past, but diagnosing similar traits in our own is another story. For example, we look at the fact that Muslim females wear those black robes with their faces veiled and lament the way Islam treats its women, while at the same time rarely seeing the demand for Botox, Calogen, and surgical augmentation as glaring testimonies against how we Westerners view our own.

We can wonder with great sanctimony how antebellum Southerners could claim to be disciples of Jesus while simultaneously being owners of slaves, but when a Fortune 500 CEO moves his company's manufacturing to a sweatshop in Malaysia so he can pay the workers $.09 an hour without having to worry about those pesky labor laws to protect them from oppression, we don't call that "slave-owning," we call it "smart business."

We watch those WWII documentaries and wonder how the German population could just sit back passively as Jews were being slaughtered, while feeling no more guilt than the Germans over the 1,000,000 innocent men, women, and children we have killed while liberating Iraq.

My point is simply that if we desire to interpret the Gospels correctly, we need begin by recognizing the dollar-shaped plank that we have firmly lodged in our collective eye.

Blessed Poverty

I just began a series of Sunday morning sermons on the Beatitudes and, after studying and reading in preparation over the past week, I've come to the conclusion that, to quote The Princess Bride, they don't mean what we think they mean.

On the first, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," we almost invariably hear that Jesus is describing the internal state of spiritual bankruptcy that results from our realizing our own sinfulness in the presence of a holy God.

Herman Ridderbos argues, however, that the blessed person described as "poor in spirit" is the one who willingly foregoes earth for heaven. In other words, when we submit to actual poverty (or some other this-worldly affliction) for the sake of Christ and his kingdom, we will be recompensed in eternity with the kind of treasure that cannot pass away.

Consider the fact that in Luke's version of the beatitudes it is the person who weeps now who is contrasted with those who will weep then, and the person who is hungry now with the one who will be lacking then. When Abraham denies the rich man his request for relief from torment in Luke 16, his rationale is that on earth he enjoyed good things while Lazarus the beggar experienced only bad things, and now it's time for the turning of the tables. After the rich young ruler left Jesus sorrowfully because of his many possessions, Jesus told the disciples that if they leave behind houses, lands, or family for his sake they will receive a hundredfold in the new world and will inherit eternal life. And the occasion for James's rebuke of the rich was that they "have lived on the earth in luxury and self-indulgence" and have thereby stored up a treasure-house of curse and condemnation for the last day.

Returning to the beatitudes, then, it is perfectly consistent with the rest of the New Testament to understand "blessed are the poor in spirit" to be describing the person who lays up his treasure in heaven to such a degree that he actually enjoys less of it here.