4th Sunday in Ordinary Time

The beatitudes form the dramatic opening of the Sermon and the Mount, the centerpiece of Jesus’ preaching in the Gospel of Matthew. In the way that Matthew has constructed his Gospel, Jesus’ sermon on the mount is meant to parallel the giving of the law on Mt. Sinai by YHWH. Just like Moses ascended Mt. Sinai to receive the law from YHWH, Matthew has the crowds ascend the mount to receive Jesus’ teaching. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus is the new Moses, who has come not to abolish the law, but rather to fulfil it. Jesus does this by giving a new law – a law of love, a law that fundamentally turns the dominant values of the time upside down and demonstrates how it is the poor who are the truly rich, it is those who mourn who shall have the last laugh and those who are reviled and hated by the world on account of justice and right who shall have the places of honour in the Kingdom of God. The beatitudes are Jesus’ magna carta which reveals that those who are little in the eyes of the world are in fact the greatest in the Kingdom of God. I can think of no better story to illustrate the great reversal brought about by the beatitudes than the following one. It is set in the 1940s of the Bible Belt of Middle America and told in the first person by Anita Smith, a fourteen year old girl:

I’ll never forget Easter 1946. I was 14, my little sister Ocy, 12, and my older sister Darlene, 16. We lived at home with our mother, and the four of us knew what it was to do without many things. My dad had died 5 years before, leaving Mom with seven school kids to raise and no money. By 1946 my older sisters were married, and my brothers had left home.

A month before Easter, the pastor of our church announced that a special Easter offering would be taken to help a poor family. He asked everyone to save and give sacrificially. When we got home, we talked about what we could do. We decided to buy 50 pounds of potatoes and live on them for a month. This would allow us to save $20 of our grocery money for the offering. Then we thought that if we kept our electric lights turned out as much as possible and didn’t listen to the radio, we’d save money on that month’s electric bill. Darlene got as many house and yard cleaning jobs as possible, and both of us baby sat for everyone we could. For 15 cents, we could buy enough cotton loops to make three pot holders to sell for $1. We make $20 on pot holders.

That month was one of the best of our lives. Every day we counted the money to see how much we had saved. At night we’d sit in the dark and talk about how the poor family was going to enjoy having the money the church would give them. We had about 80 people in church, so we figured that whatever amount of money we had to give, the offering would surely be 20 times that much. After all, every Sunday the Pastor had reminded everyone to save for the sacrificial offering.

The day before Easter, Ocy and I walked to the grocery store and got the manager to give us three crisp $20 bills and one $10 bill for all our change. We ran all the way home to show Mom and Darlene. We had never had so much money before. That night we were so excited we could hardly sleep. We didn’t care that we wouldn’t have new clothes for Easter; we had $70 for the sacrificial offering. We could hardly wait to get to church!

On Sunday morning, rain was pouring. We didn’t own an umbrella, and the church was over a mile from our home, but it didn’t seem to matter how wet we got. Darlene had cardboard in her shoes to fill the holes. The cardboard came apart, and her feet got wet. But we sat in church proudly. I heard some teenagers talking about the Smith girls having on their old dresses. I looked at them in their new clothes, and I felt so rich.

When the sacrificial offering was taken, we were sitting on the second row from the front. Mom put in the $10 bill, and each of us girls put in a $20. As we walked home after church, we sang all the way. At lunch Mom had a surprise for us. She had bought a dozen eggs, and we had boiled Easter eggs with our fried potatoes! Late that afternoon the minister drove up in his car. Mom went to the door, talked with him for a moment, and then came back with an envelope in her hand. We asked what it was, but she didn’t say a word. She opened the envelope and out fell a bunch of money. There were three crisp $20 bills, one $10 and seventeen $1 bills. Mom put the money back in the envelope. We didn’t talk, just sat and stared at the floor. We had gone from feeling like millionaires to feeling like poor white trash.

We kids had had such a happy life that we felt sorry for anyone who didn’t have our mom and dad for parents and a house full of brothers and sisters and other kids visiting constantly. We thought it was fun to share silverware and see whether we got the fork or the spoon that night. We had two knives which we passed around to whoever needed them. I knew we didn’t have a lot of things that other people had, but I’d never thought we were poor. That Easter Day I found out we were.

The minister had brought us the money for the poor family, so we must be poor. I didn’t like being poor. I looked at my dress and worn-out shoes and felt so ashamed that I didn’t want to go back to church. Everyone there probably already knew we were poor! I thought about school. I was in the ninth grade and at the top of my class of over 100 students. I wondered if the kids at school knew we were poor.

We sat in silence for a long time. Then it got dark, and we went to bed. All that week, we girls went to school and came home, and no one talked much. Finally on Saturday, Mom asked us what we wanted to do with the money. What did poor people do with money? We didn’t know. We’d never known we were poor. We didn’t want to go to church on Sunday, but Mom said we had to. Although it was a sunny day, we didn’t talk on the way.

Mom started to sing, but no one joined in and she only sang one verse. At church we had a missionary speaker. He talked about how churches in Uganda made buildings out of sun-dried bricks, but they need money to buy roofs. He said $100 would put a roof on a church. The minister said, “Can’t we all sacrifice to help these poor people?”

We looked at each other and smiled for the first time in a week. Mom reached into her purse and pulled out the envelope. She passed it to Darlene. Darlene gave it to me, and I handed it to Ocy. Ocy put it in the offering. When the offering was counted, the minister announced that it was a little over $100. The missionary was excited. He hadn’t expected such a large offering from our small church. He said, “You must have some rich people in this church.” Suddenly it struck us! We had given $87 of that “little over $100.” We were the rich family in the church! Hadn’t the missionary said so? From that day on I’ve never been poor again. I’ve always remembered how rich I am because I have Jesus.

The beatitudes tell us about a great reversal that obtains in the Kingdom of God. The Smith family, who were considered the poorest amongst the church, actually turned out to be the richest from the perspective of the Kingdom of God. True riches are measured in the amount that you are prepared to give away. It is only those who are poor in spirit who are able to consider the needs of others as being more important than their own needs. What stands out for me in this story is the almost effortless way in which the Smith family organically prioritizes the needs of others above their own. They realize that their lives are not about themselves. They are literally devastated when their Church tries to make their life all about themselves. They are also devastated that they seem to be worshiping with a community who do not share their vision of reality. If we look at the story, as long as the focus of the Smith family was all about helping others, they were joyful, carefree. But as soon as their own church tried to shift the focus of the Smith family inward onto themselves as a poor family, they lost their joy. They became silent and depressed. As soon as they were able to shift the focus back onto others by helping contribute to building a missionary church in Uganda, they became joyful.

The more we allow ourselves to become puffed up with our own importance, to become engrossed with our own agenda, the less free we become, and as a consequence, the less joyful. Contrary to the rest of the beatitudes, where the reward is set in the future, the reward for the poor in spirit is set in the present, “theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.” To live in the Kingdom of heaven is to know the joy and freedom that come with making your life about serving others. To live in the Kingdom of heaven is to be freed from the strictures that come with the labels and expectations that others project onto us. The Smith family refused to allow themselves to be defined by the helplessness and low self esteem that usually come with the label “poor” that their church tried to give them. In this way they were able to find the necessary agency to become the richest family in the Church in terms of giving.

Nevertheless, a word of caution is in order. We should not attempt to decouple the clear link that the gospels establish between material poverty and poverty of spirit. Scripture scholars tell us that the original form of this beatitude is to be found in Luke: “Blessed are the poor…” Matthew has chosen to soften this beatitude because he was writing to a middle class audience who he did not want to alienate. So he adds the phrase “in spirit.” The Smith story clearly shows that it is the attitude of not being the centre of one’s own life that defines this beatitude. If we want to be the “blessed of the Kingdom” then we have to cultivate an attitude of spiritual poverty. However, we who are not poor have to interrogate ourselves long and hard as to how we achieve such a spirit without the simplicity and humility that come from being materially poor. We cannot deny that the ease with which the Smith family prioritized other’s needs over their own was in some way founded on their own simplicity of life, on the fact that in the social hierarchy of their Church, they were really on the bottom. Their carefree ignorance of where they were situated on this social hierarchy is unquestionably linked to their poverty of spirit. Isn’t this the definition of humility itself – being liberated from a pre-occupation with where we stand in the social hierarchy. It is this immense freedom that is so compelling about the Smith family, and is undoubtedly the source of their joy. This is why the Kingdom of heaven can be theirs right now – they have thrown away the calculating savoir-faire of the world that cuts off the unadulterated joy of the children of God. May we know this same joy as we stive to become poor in spirit. Questions for reflection

1. What feelings are stirred up in me as I read this story of the Smith family?
2. What are my feelings towards my own social status? How concerned am I with moving up or down the ladder?
3. What are the ways in which I might become poorer in spirit, more grounded in my own spiritual and material poverty as a creature wholly dependent on my Creator?