Pure in Heart: Remade in the image of Jesus...

Matthew 5:8

8 ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Remember the temptation to think in an ‘us and them’ way and to individualise the teachings of Jesus at the expense of thinking as a collective people? We can so easily end up blaming the individual (ourselves and others) for what seems wrong in life. We can treat people as if it’s all a matter of their ‘nature’; it’s all about their fundamental make up; it’s all in the genes. Alternatively, we might have a tendency to blame the environment for all that is wrong in our lives. We slip so easily into the blame mode; ‘I blame the government: I blame the parents: I blame the teachers, I blame the Church, I blame God…’ and so it goes on and on. We reduce ourselves to a product of ‘nurture’. But is any of this what Jesus is teaching in this passage here? Ok, let’s think about it in another way. Say, there is no ‘two world view’ no set of binary opposites of nature and nurture where only one can be right. Say there is only one holistic experience available to us. In this way of thinking about life we are one conscious whole and we perceive as a complete human being in an interdependent relationship with our environment and each other. If this is true, Jesus would be teaching something very much more radical for us in our day and time. He would be saying that we need to know who we are as human beings to know the world around us; to truly be able to discern what is ethical.

 In our passage, the heart (kardia) implies the place of knowing, the essence and consciousness of the self; the centre of our ‘"desire-decisions" that establish who we really are’ (Strong’s concordance). And the word pure (katharoi) is a Greek word that means free from mixtures of elements or soiled by contaminants. In other words, Jesus is teaching that to see who we are in the creative work of God, that is, who God has created and continues to create us to be, we need to be free from the plethora of powers and influences that defines us in their interests. We have to be free from the powerful mixtures of ideas expressed in stories that diminish our personhood, casts us as characters in narratives in which we do not belong and places us in the ‘I blame myself’ or ‘I blame you’ debacle. How about, if we, as disciples, experienced ourselves and our community as one ‘holistic’ understanding; where we collectively understood that:  ‘I am’ (this is the heart) who God has created me to be (this is purity) and live among others (other hearts) created by God to, live together in peaceful interdependent communion and covenant relationship. This collective purity is taught in the previous beatitudes. According to His Nazareth sermon, Jesus claimed that He came to fulfil this very  promise for all of humanity. Therefore Jesus claims to  have inaugurated the domain of influence where these truths are accepted as accomplished in Him and among those who wait for the final consummation of this ‘Kingdom of God’ taught by Jesus.  The Bible is the source of the narrative account that empowers us to become ‘pure in heart’, that is, becoming the people God has created us to be. The power of this life transforming and empowering story must be seen in the lives of individuals who accept their part in the narrative and the gathered communities they form. If not, they are living out the characters of some other story defining and contaminating their ‘Heart’. According to Jesus, if we would be blessed, happy deep down, we have to devote ourselves to becoming the people God has created us to be as revealed in scripture. This is the only life worth devoting ourselves to. It’s not what goes into us from some outside world that ultimately defines us but that which can come from our renewed heart; re-made in the image of Jesus and the practice of His teachings.