Poor in Spirit

You have been running a competence you do not actually have. Perhaps at work, perhaps in the marriage, perhaps in the group where everyone assumes you are the one with the answer, and the effort of maintaining it is now costing more than the thing it was protecting.

And Jesus opens the most famous sermon ever preached by congratulating the people who have run out.

The word matters here, because English flattens it. Greek had a word for the working poor, the man who has to labour for what he eats and has nothing spare. Jesus does not use it. He uses the other one, the beggar's word, from a verb meaning to crouch or cower: a person with nothing at all, whose only remaining option is to hold out a hand. Poor in spirit is that condition, applied inward. Not humility as a manner. Emptiness, known.

And then the tense. Most of the beatitudes promise something later; they shall be comforted, they shall inherit, they shall be filled. This one is present. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven, now, in the possession of people who by definition brought nothing to the exchange. Which tells you the entry was never an exchange. The self sufficient walk past the door with their hands full, and nothing is being withheld from them; there is simply no way to receive a kingdom while holding everything else.

So find the sentence you have been unable to say and say it once this week, to one person who has earned the right to hear it: I do not know what I am doing here. Then say the same thing to God without dressing it up first. He is not going to be surprised, and it is the only posture in which a hand is open.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 329 is Whereby Shall I Know (Genesis 15:6).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna