Poor

Matthew 5: 1-3

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. ²Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying: 3 ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Today we are invited by Jesus to come into His company and hear His words. We have heard lots about Jesus; He is a great teacher to some while to others His philosophy is revolutionary in nature. We have heard so much but what did He say and what did He actually mean? Over the past weeks we have been looking at the message and practices of Jesus in terms of the Nazareth synagogue sermon (Luke 4:18) and the events that led up to it and followed it. We have arrived at the invitation of Jesus to leave everything and follow Him. He does not ask us to become fans; He calls us to become followers. He calls to put into practice His words; to give His words priority and interpret everything in life in terms of His words.  He calls us to make other disciples in the name of the Triune God. He calls us to live out life as part of His Kingdom and based on His values, attitudes, beliefs and actions in the here and now! He offers us participation in the Kingdom of Heaven now because God has inaugurated the Kingdom through His Son.  In His teaching called the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) Jesus is expanding and explaining the Nazareth Sermon based on Isaiah 61 prophecy. He is fulfilling the prophecy as He said in Nazareth. Jesus is not just teaching a set of do’s and don’ts. The Sermon on the Mount is not a list of the works required to be performed for redemption.     Secondly, let’s not fall into the trap of thinking material poverty somehow makes you holy and with the associated oppression are the precursors to blessing. Poverty is misery and death; the poor die young (Read the Black Report and the Acheson Report both online) and only the blindly ignorant wealthy and totally alienated poor teach otherwise. Without such an understanding we will end up perversely accepting poverty as inevitability and vows of poverty as redemptive. This is the exact opposite of the teaching of Jesus. In the beatitudes and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount we are being called to celebrate the overthrow of the empire of poverty and participate in the realisation of the Kingdom of the blessed. We are blessed not because we are poor in spirit but because Jesus has come and He has set us free from the spirit of poverty. It’s done! The fulfilment of the scriptures has happened; celebrate because we are blessed in Christ; His life His Teachings. God has poured out His undeserved loving kindness on us the poor in Spirit; those who realise meeting their needs their own way leads to poverty and death in the presence of plenty.  God has brought us into His Kingdom through His Son. This is prophetic fulfilment; this is Grace. It is costly to God and us; both God and us participate in the coming of the Kingdom reality seen in the life of disciples. You and I are the poor who have been blessed by God through the liberation of His Son. Jesus has achieved it all; we need to participate in the freedom or remain poor captives of meeting our needs our own way.   Blessed are the people who know they have a tendency to meet their whole person human needs their own way resulting in whole person poverty before God; the blessed serve the needs of the other poor in offering them the opportunity to meet their needs the way God intended.