At the risk of doing yet further violence to a rotting equestrian corpse, I recall the famous lines put in the mouth of the Statue of Liberty by Emma Lazarus and cast in bronze on a plaque inside that monument:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
The sentiment of that poem is hard to reconcile with current debates over immigration and refugees. But my point in remembering those words is not more political discussion of those issues. It’s to acknowledge their kinship with even older, even more famous words spoken by Jesus Christ,
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice [righteousness],
for they shall be filled.
I am always struck by the fact that the common lectionary chose that text (and the rest of the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:1-12) as a Gospel reading for All Saints Day. This year of the lectionary cycle it’s actually Luke’s version of the blessings, but I’m going to go with Matthew because we read it in our Community Bible Experience this past week.
In any case, the framers of the lectionary seemed to think that the Beatitudes express something about the character of saints. So does Pope Francis, who yesterday in an All Saints message in Sweden called the Beatitudes the Christian “identity card,” and offered an additional six beatitudes of his own for the present time.
The Pope’s beatitudes express fine aspirations for Christian virtue in response to the needs of our day, but they may obscure what Jesus wanted to say by beginning where He did. Jesus’ original Beatitudes begin with blessing on those suffering painful circumstances rather than with the blessings on what seems more virtuous behavior in the second half of the Beatitudes.
Christian identity certainly includes virtue, all kinds of virtue like purity and peace and Francis’ suggestions of faithfulness in the face of evil and solidarity with those on the margins. But Jesus wants us to recognize that our identity begins in our own need and marginality (spell-check says that’s not a word, but who cares). We are not in the kingdom because we belong there, but because in our poverty of spirit it was given to us by grace. And so for the rest of at least those first four Beatitudes. Dallas Willard makes at least an interesting case that the last four should be read the same way, not as virtues, but as deficits which God meets with an outpouring of love and grace (so the “merciful” are not exactly wonderful forgiving folks, they are people who are as guilty as anyone else and are often taken advantage of for extending the mercy to others which they’d like to have for themselves).
As we observe All Saints in our worship on this coming Sunday, it’s a good time to remember the basic and abject humility of who we are in Christ, poor, sad, meek and hungry, with nothing really good to say for ourselves. Starting there, we can really rejoice when Jesus tells us how blessed in fact we are. Thanks be to God.