The Mass readings for today and the Psalm (Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth) offer us yet another insight into God’s ways and how Jesus continues to direct our lives in grace, through the Scriptures. Today, we are reading one of the great passages of the Scriptures spoken by Jesus: the Sermon on the Mount. This is also known as the Beatitudes. I have chosen to reflect deeply on three of these beatitudes. First, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven,” second, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land,” and third, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.”
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven,”
The poor in spirit: in the Old Testament, the poor (’anāwîm) are those who are without material possessions and whose confidence is in God (see Is 61:1; Zep 2:3; in the New American Bible the word is translated lowly and humble, respectively, in those texts). According to the USCCB scriptural portal, Matthew added in spirit in order either to indicate that only the devout poor were meant or to extend the beatitude to all, of whatever social rank, who recognized their complete dependence on God. Poverty of spirit is not material poverty alone, though it includes it. It is the condition of those who know their radical dependence on God — who have nothing to offer, nothing to boast of, nothing to protect. It is the opposite of self-sufficiency.
In a world that rewards confidence, achievement, and self-promotion, the poor in spirit are those who have been stripped by suffering, by failure, by honest self-knowledge of the illusion that they can save themselves. And Jesus says: theirs is the Kingdom. The Kingdom belongs already to those who are emptied. Moreover, this resonates deeply with the kenotic theology or faith. It means understanding the self-emptying of Christ as the grammar of divine love. To be poor in spirit is to share in the poverty of the incarnate God who came not in power but in vulnerability.
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land”
Meekness is consistently misread as weakness on the contrary, in the biblical tradition, the meek (praus in Greek) are those who have great strength but hold it gently. Meekness qualifies those who do not grasp, do not dominate, do not impose. Moses is described as the meekest man on earth (Numbers 12:3), and Moses was anything but weak. To inherit the land is not a promise of real estate. It is the promise that those who do not seize the world by force will nonetheless receive it as a gift. The meek do not conquer; they receive. This is the logic of grace over the logic of power. In the Igbo-African context, meekness corresponds to the refusal to absolutize, the openness to the second point of view, the dialogical rather than dominating engagement with reality.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy”
This is the only Beatitude where the promise corresponds directly to the disposition: “you will receive what you give”. Mercy (eleos in Greek, hesed in Hebrew) is the loving-kindness that goes beyond what is owed — that responds to need rather than to merit. There is a profound reciprocity here that is not merely transactional. The merciful are not promised mercy as a reward for a successful transaction. Rather, in the act of showing mercy they are already participating in the divine life — already inhabiting the Kingdom — and therefore they are already within the sphere of God’s own mercy. To show mercy is to enter the logic of grace itself.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven
The Beatitude ends not in lament but in joy. Not the shallow joy of those who have been spared suffering, but the deep joy of those who have discovered that suffering endured in fidelity to God is not wasted but transformed. The prophets who were persecuted before us are not forgotten. Their lives were not futile. The arc of history, as Jürgen Moltmann reminds us, bends toward the God who is always still coming — the God of the resurrection who makes all things new.
To reflect on the Beatitudes is therefore not primarily to ask “How can I become this?” but rather “Do I recognize Christ?” —in the poor, in the mourning, in the peacemakers, in the persecuted. This is so because it is in practice that we become. Being and doing are the significant realities of Jesus’ identity. In practicing the Beatitude, we are already, as Edward Schillebeeckx reminds us, allowing the prose of our lives to overflow into poetry.
