The Poor

The Lord opens the great sermon with a word that turns the whole world’s reckoning upside down. Blessed, he says, are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. This is the first of the beatitudes, and it is the doorway to all the rest, for the kingdom does not begin with the strong or the accomplished or the full, but with the poor. Everything the Lord goes on to promise is built on this first foundation, that the kingdom of heaven belongs, of all people, to the poor in spirit.

We must be careful what he means, for he does not simply mean the poor in purse, though he had a special tenderness for them. He means the poor in spirit, the soul that knows itself bankrupt before God, that has no righteousness to bring and no merit to plead, that stands empty-handed and knows it. The word he uses is the word for the crouching beggar, the one who has nothing at all and must hold out an empty hand for everything. To be poor in spirit is to have come to the end of your own resources, to know that before God you are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked, and to have stopped pretending otherwise.

THE EMPTY HAND

This is the exact opposite of the spirit of Laodicea, which said, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing. The Laodicean came to God with full hands, or hands he imagined full, and there was no room in them to receive. The poor in spirit come with empty hands, and the empty hand is the only hand that can receive grace. You cannot be given the riches of the kingdom while your fists are closed around your own supposed wealth. The first thing grace requires is that we let go of the pretense of our own sufficiency and open the empty hand.

The Lord drew the contrast unforgettably in two men who went up to pray. The one, a Pharisee, stood and thanked God that he was not as other men, reciting his fasts and his tithes, his hands full of his own righteousness. The other, a publican, would not so much as lift his eyes, but smote upon his breast and said, God be merciful to me a sinner. He came with empty hands and a poverty he did not hide. And the Lord’s verdict is the whole gospel in a sentence. This man went down to his house justified rather than the other. The poor in spirit was the one who went home right with God, and the rich in spirit went home as he came, empty of the only thing that mattered.

THE BLESSEDNESS OF BANKRUPTCY

And here is the wonder of it, that this poverty is called blessed. We would count it misery to be shown our own bankruptcy, to be stripped of every pretension of worth and left holding nothing. But the Lord calls it blessed, and adds a present possession, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, theirs now, not someday. The one thing that qualifies a soul for the kingdom is to know that it does not qualify. The bankruptcy is the entrance. Only the poor can receive the riches of grace, for grace is a gift to the empty-handed and cannot be sold to the rich. To know your poverty is already to hold the key to the kingdom.

This is why God so often works by emptying before he fills. He hath filled the hungry with good things, the song of Mary declares, and the rich he hath sent empty away. The way into the kingdom runs downward, through the loss of our imagined riches, through the failure of our self-effort, through the honest sight of our own need. To this man will I look, God says, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit. God’s gaze rests not on the self-satisfied but on the poor, and the mercy of being brought low is that it brings us into the place where God looks and gives.

STAYING POOR

And this poverty is not only the door we enter by but the posture we must keep, for there is a subtle danger of growing rich in spirit again. As a soul advances, as it gains in knowledge and discipline and even in real grace, the old self-sufficiency creeps quietly back, now dressed in spiritual clothes, and the beggar begins to fancy himself a man of means. This is the peril of the maturing soul, that it should lose its poverty and become, without noticing, a Pharisee thanking God for its own progress. The mature saint is not the one who has graduated from poverty of spirit but the one who has sunk deeper into it, who knows his need more truly at the end than at the beginning, and holds the empty hand more consciously the further he goes.

So the apostle, far along in grace, gloried not in his attainments but in his weakness, and could say, when I am weak, then am I strong. He had learned the secret that the whole Christian life is lived from the empty hand, that we begin poor and we stay poor, receiving everything and earning nothing, from the first day to the last. The rich young ruler could not enter because he would not become poor; the beggar Lazarus was carried into Abraham’s bosom. The kingdom is for beggars, and the safest place a soul can stand is with an empty and open hand.

POOR, THAT WE MIGHT BE RICH

The deepest ground of this blessing on the poor is that the King himself became poor. Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the apostle writes, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich. There is the great exchange at the heart of the gospel. He who possessed the riches of heaven emptied himself, took the poverty of our flesh and our lot, was born in a borrowed stable and buried in a borrowed tomb, and owned nothing at the end but the clothes the soldiers gambled for. He became poor. And he did it that we, through his poverty, might be made rich.

So the poverty of spirit that opens the kingdom is not a bare emptiness left to itself. It is an emptiness that is filled from his fullness, a poverty that receives his riches. The poor in spirit are not blessed because poverty is good in itself, but because their empty hands are exactly the hands into which the wealth of Christ is poured. He took our poverty and gives us his riches, and the exchange is made in the soul that knows itself poor and comes to him empty to be filled. The beggar at the gate goes in to the marriage feast; the one who had nothing inherits all things in Christ.

This is why the poor of this world have so often been the rich in faith. Hath not God chosen the poor of this world, the apostle James asks, rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him? Those who have least in their hands have often had most in their hearts, precisely because they had nothing else to lean on and so learned to lean wholly on God. The empty hand that could hold no earthly wealth was free to be filled with heavenly, and the poverty the world pitied was the very door through which the riches of Christ came in.

So the poor in spirit lose nothing and gain everything. They let go of the counterfeit riches of their own righteousness and receive the true riches of Christ’s. They are emptied of self and filled with God. The whole movement of grace is here, that we come poor and go away rich, not with a wealth of our own earning but with the unsearchable riches of Christ, given freely to the empty- handed, and given, wonderfully, because he first became poor for us.

So do not hide your poverty, and do not dress it up as riches. Own your bankruptcy before God; come with the empty hand; be the publican and not the Pharisee. And when you have advanced, when grace has grown and gifts have multiplied, guard your poverty most of all then, for the greatest danger to the poor in spirit is to forget that they are poor. Keep the empty hand held out, for it is into empty hands that God pours the riches of his kingdom, and it is to the poor, and only the poor, that the Lord says, blessed are ye, for yours is the kingdom of heaven.