The Poor in Spirit

My sermon for last Sunday, 4th in Ordinary Time, Year A:

There's a type of person in the Bible who is held up as an ideal or a model of faith in God: the poor humble man, or the poor righteous man.

In many places the authors of the Old Testament draw an approving picture of the person whose material circumstances are insecure, who is under no illusions about his or her lowly social status and lack of influence, but who persists in devotion to God and in trying to live a good moral life, in keeping with God's Law.


The Old Testament often contrasts the poor humble person with the rich and arrogant - those who enjoy their wealth selfishly, look down on their inferiors and turn a blind eye to suffering. All the readings we have for this Sunday's Mass are good examples of these biblical attitudes and ideals. We see the thread that runs through the whole of the Bible: God is close to the poor and humble but very far from the rich and proud.

In our culture today, very different from Old Testament times or the time of Christ, it's probably not so easy to make a straightforward connection between poverty and righteousness, between poverty and humble devotion to God. There are lots of pressures and a huge amount of propaganda in our consumer society that encourage everyone to be preoccupied with the material side of life, with food and clothes, expensive gadgets and toys and all the rest of it.

And while I think that a lot of people manage to resist the pressures, and reject the propaganda, a lot of people don't. And unfortunately, doctors, social workers, teachers and police who work in the most deprived parts of our society would testify that they don't often encounter examples of Old Testament-style righteousness; but they do see a lot of depressing selfish, predatory behaviour.

So if we're trying to reflect on what Christ has to say in the gospel today - happy the poor in spirit, happy the gentle, happy the pure in heart and so on - I think we're more likely to find instances of these qualities, not so much among the materially poor, as among people who have been defeated or brought low in some way, people who have been through a great deal of suffering and have been brought face to face with their own weakness and vulnerability. Or else maybe we could think of places like Jean Vanier's L'Arche Communities, where physically and mentally handicapped people live in community with the able-bodied people who are looking after them.

There are two ways that individuals react when they come in contact with weakness and vulnerability. One way is to feel contempt, to ridicule, to bully, to exploit people they regard as inferior. And that's an expression of the refusal to love which is the essence of human sinfulness.

But the other way of reacting is: to be converted; to learn poverty of spirit from those who in some sense already possess, or have already acquired, that quality.

In the second reading today Saint Paul addresses the members of the church community at Corinth, rebuking them in characteristically blunt language, for the lofty pretentions they seem to have been entertaining about themselves and their lack of poverty of spirit.

Like Jesus' Beatitudes, this passage from Saint Paul's letter has become a kind of classic statement of the way that God's values are very different from our human, worldly values. Like the Beatitudes, Paul's words show how we often have to completely reverse the values and attitudes we take for granted in everyday life if we want to belong to God's Kingdom.

"It was to shame the wise," Paul says, "that God chose what is foolish by human reckoning, and to shame what is strong that he chose what is weak by human reckoning; those whom the world thinks common and contemptible are the ones that God has chosen - those who are nothing at all to show up those who are everything."

The more we come to recognise the qualities that God is looking for in us, and take them to heart, the closer we'll come to this "poverty of spirit" that Jesus proclaimed to be essential for belonging to the Kingdom of Heaven.