The passage: Jesus opened his mouth and taught them: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven … Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’ (Matthew v. 2, 3, 5.)
The Lord’s words are the sower’s seed. They must fall into our hearts to grow, watered by meditation and prayer and kept in the sun by obedience, so that they bear fruit for his gathering.
Disciples, that is, obedient hearers, with some experience of trying to live would at once understand the words in part, and as they obeyed and pondered, the meaning kept growing, as the apostles’ writings show. So it will be with us, who need to understand all he said as much as those he first spoke to. Our obligation is greater, having two thousand years’ experience of the kingdom’s continued coming: it is not yet come, but is slowly drawing nearer.
The sermon on the mount seems the Lord’s first free announcement of the kingdom’s good news to a large assembly. He had been teaching disciples and messengers, and had already brought the glad tidings that his father was their father to others: Nathanael, Nicodemus, the woman of Samaria, everyone he cured or who cried to him for help. His epiphany was gradual, beginning, where it continues, with the individual. We cannot guess how many heard him now; he seems to have gone up the mount to speak from a more open place because of the crowd, and those who wished to be taught followed, with doubtless many drawn mainly by curiosity. Disciple or gazer, he addressed each one with ears to hear. Peter, Andrew, James and John are all we know as his disciples then; but though he spoke to those who came to learn, his words were eternal truths, essential to life for every child of his father, and so for all: whoever heard to obey was his disciple.
How different the good news must have sounded from what those awaiting the Messiah expected! Even the Baptist in prison listened for something else. The Lord sent him word by eye-witnesses of his doings, to remind him that God’s thoughts and ways are not ours, and his design is other and better than men’s expectation. His summary of his gifts ended with the preaching of good news to the poor. If John knew these doings, he had not seen them as the Lord’s special mission; he must recognize them as the work the Son of God came to do, so divine as to be the very business of him in whom the Father was well pleased.
Wherein lay the goodness of the news? What in it made the poor glad? Why was his coming with such words the coming of the kingdom?
All good news from heaven is of essential truth, which involves duty and promises help to do it. There is no good news but of uplifting love, and no one can be lifted who will not rise; were God to try to raise his little ones without their consenting effort, they would fall from his foiled endeavour. He will carry us till we can walk, and when we are weary with walking; he will not carry us if we will not walk.
Very different is Jesus’ good news from certain prevalent representations of the gospel, founded on the pagan notion that suffering offsets sin and culminating in the vile assertion that the suffering of an innocent man, just because he is perfect, satisfies the holy Father for his children’s evil deeds. As a theory of atonement nothing could be worse intellectually, morally or spiritually, and announced as the gospel itself it is as monstrous as any Chinese dragon. However good men accept it as God-sent, it is evil news, dwarfing, enslaving, maddening, news of dreariest damnation to the child-heart. Elements of the gospel are doubtless mixed with it, but that does not make it his message. It can be good news only to those willing to be delivered from a God they fear but unable to accept the gospel of a perfect God to trust perfectly.
The good news of Jesus was just the news of the Father’s thoughts and ways in the midst of his family. He told them that men’s way of thinking for themselves and their children was not God’s way for himself and his children; that the kingdom of heaven was founded, and must at length show itself founded, on principles very different from those of the world’s kingdoms and families, ‘the world’ meaning that part of the Father’s family which will not be ordered by him or even try to obey. The world’s great, successful, honourable man may have and do as he pleases, his strength in money and men’s praise; the greatest in the kingdom of heaven is the humblest, who serves his fellows most. Multitudes, even of those who look for the world to come, honour the proud and seek deliverance from this world’s evils in this world’s powers, as if God were God of the world to come only. The oppressed of the Lord’s time looked for a Messiah to set their nation free, rich and strong; the oppressed of ours believe in money, knowledge, and the will of a people that needs only power to be in turn the oppressor. The Lord’s first words here were: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’
Not the proud, the greedy of distinction, those who hoard or lay down the law to their neighbours, those who condescend or shrug and shoot out the lip, have any share in the Father’s kingdom. It resembles nothing in this world’s kingdoms and deals with nothing that distinguishes their rulers except to repudiate it. The Son of God will favour no smallest ambition, even in him who leans on his bosom. The kingdom of God, the refuge of the oppressed, the real Utopia, the newest yet oldest Atlantis, the home of the children, will not admit the most miserable man who would rise above an equal in misery or look down on one more miserable. It is the home of perfect brotherhood. Its citizens of the new Jerusalem are the poor, the beggars in spirit, the unambitious and unselfish, who never despise men or seek their praise, who see nothing to admire in themselves and so cannot seek admiration, who give themselves away. They know their essential poverty: not poverty in friends, influence, acquirements or money, but in spirit, feeling themselves poor creatures, with nothing to be pleased with themselves for, knowing they need much to make life worth living and themselves fit to live. These the Lord calls blessed. When a man says, I am low and worthless, the gate of the kingdom begins to open, for the true enter there, and he has begun to know the truth about himself. Whatever he has attained he forgets; it is behind him; his business is with what he has not. The man proud of what he thinks he has reached has not reached it; he is proud only of himself, and imagines a cause. He who delights in contemplating what he has attained is already in the dirt of self-satisfaction, the gate closed and he outside. The child who, clinging to his Father, dares not think he has attained while not yet as his Father, has his Father’s heart for his natural home. To find himself thinking himself above his fellows, or feel the least motion of self-satisfaction, would be a shuddering terror, a flash from the nether abyss. God is his life and lord, and his whole care is that his father be content with him. He would not choose to be less than his neighbour, but would choose him greater; he looks up to every man, and differently gifted, his neighbour is more than he. All come from the one mighty father: shall he judge which live thought of God is greater? In thus turning his back on himself he has no thought of saintliness, only of his father and his brethren. To such a child heaven’s best secrets are open. He clambers about the Father’s throne unrebuked; his back is ready for the smallest heavenly playmate, his arms a refuge for any blackest little lost kid of the Father’s flock, which he will carry up the very steps of the great white throne to lay on the Father’s knees. For the glory of that Father is not in knowing himself God but in giving himself away, in creating and redeeming and glorifying his children.
The man who does not house self has room to be his real self, God’s eternal idea of him. By the creative power present in him each moment, he is and lives eternally. He thinks nothing of ruling or surpassing, sees no good in being greater than another, and wishes himself other than he is only to be more what God made him for, the highest willing of God’s will. His brother’s wellbeing is essential to his bliss; to stand higher in God’s favour than his brother would make him miserable. He would lift every brother to the Father’s embrace. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they are of the same spirit as God, and the kingdom of heaven is theirs by nature.
‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth’ expresses the same principle: the same law holds in the earth as in the kingdom of heaven. Has the creator of the ends of the earth ceased to rule it his way because his rebellious children have so long, to their hurt, vainly tried to rule it theirs? The earth as God sees it, and as those of the kingdom see it, is very good, fit for the meek to inherit; and one day they shall, not as men of the world count inheritance but as its maker and owner has from the first counted it. So different are the two ways that one of the meek may enjoy his possession while one of the proud selfishly walls him out from the spot he loves best.
The meek do not assert or defend themselves, never dream of avenging themselves or returning anything but good for evil, and do not think it their business to take care of themselves. The meek man may take much thought, but not for himself. He builds no exclusive wall and shuts out no honest neighbour. He will not always serve his neighbour’s wish, but always his good, and his service must be true. Self shall be no umpire in his affairs: man’s consciousness of himself is but a shadow, which vanishes in the light of a real presence. His nature lies open to the Father of men, and as it were empty to every good impulse. No bristling importance or fancied rights and wrongs crowd his house; it is left free for angels. Abandoned thus to the truth, he receives the many souls of the visible world, lights from the father of lights, as the sparks from the gleaming river dip into the flowers in Dante’s unperfected vision, and by them he inherits the earth he was created to inherit, possessing it as his father made him capable of possessing and the earth of being possessed. Because he is meek his eye is single; he sees things as God sees them: to confront creation with pure eyes is to possess it.
How little he can make his own who would ravish all! The man who would grasp any portion of the earth by excluding others from the space he calls his only befools himself; even the bread he has swallowed cannot truly be his. There is no such power of possessing as he arrogates, no such sense of having as the shadow he has conceived in his degenerate imagination. The real owner of his demesne is the pedlar passing his gate, a divine soul receiving the sweetnesses that all the greed of the so-counted possessor cannot keep within his walls: they overflow the coping to the footfarer. The air’s motions and the sounds and odours of those imprisoned spaces are the earnest of a possession his growing power of possessing is ready for, and it does not interfere with the claim of the man who calls them his: each has them as far as he is able to possess them. For possession is determined by the kind and scope of the power of possessing, and the earth has a fourth dimension of which the mere owner of its soil knows nothing.
The child of the maker is naturally the inheritor. But if he tries to possess as a house what his father made an organ, will he succeed? Or if he nestles in a corner of its case, will he oust the Lord of its manifold harmony, who sits regnant and draws with ‘volant touch’ from the child’s house the liege homage of its rendered wealth? Such is the poverty left to all who think to have and hold after the corrupt fancies of a greedy self.
We cannot see the world as God means it except as our souls are meek; only in meekness are we its inheritors. Meekness alone makes the spiritual retina pure to receive God’s things as they are, mingling no imperfection or impurity of its own. A thing so beheld that it conveys to me the divine thought issuing in its form is mine; nothing can be mine but by its mediation between God and my life. The man dull enough to insist that a thing is his because he bought it should consider that all law, justice and goodwill combined cannot keep it his, while not even death can take the world from the man who possesses it as his maker cares he should. That man leaves it but carries it with him; the other carries with him only its loss. Its ownness to him was only the changes he could make in it and how near he could bring it to his body. That body the earth now possesses; is that the fine of the great buyer of land? In the soul of the meek the earth remains an endless possession, his because he who made it is his, by his divine relation to him who sent it forth as a tree sends out its leaves. To inherit the earth is to grow ever more alive to the presence in it of him who is the life of men. How far one may advance in this while in the body depends on the meekness he attains there; but it may be, as Frederick Denison Maurice, the servant of God, thought while with us, that the new heavens and the new earth are those in which we now live, righteously inhabited by the meek with deeper-opened eyes. What if the meek among the dead possess it even now! But I do not care to speculate. It is enough that the man who refuses to assert himself, seeks no recognition by men, leaves the care of his life to the Father and busies himself with the Father’s will, shall find himself by and by at home in the Father’s house with all the Father’s property his.
Which is the richer possessor of the world: the man with a thousand houses who, his money spent, would have no refuge, or the man with none of his own but ten where his knock would rouse jubilation, and for whose need a hundred would sacrifice comfort? Which possessed the earth, king Agrippa or tent-maker Paul?
Who really possesses a book: the man who has the first edition and every later one, shows visitors now this binding, now that, with possessor-pride, and can produce from a secret shrine the author’s manuscript; or the man who cherishes one little, coverless, untitled, thumbed copy, which he takes on solitary walks and broods over in his chamber, always finding something new, a live companion?
For what makes the thing a book? Is it not that it has a soul, the mind in it of him who wrote it? So only life can possess it. The dead possess their dead only to bury them.
Does not he who loves and understands his book possess it as the other cannot? So the world may be possessed: as a volume unread, or as ‘the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life’; as a book of words from the mouth of God, or only its golden-clasped covers; as an incarnation of God, or a house built to sell. The Lord loved the world and its things, not as the men of the world love them, but finding his father in everything that came from his father’s heart.
The same spirit, then, is required for possessing the kingdom of heaven and inheriting the earth, since one Power is the informing life of both. If we are the Lord’s, we possess the kingdom of heaven and so inherit the earth. How many who bear his name would have it otherwise, possessing the earth and inheriting the kingdom! They fill churches and chapels on Sundays; anywhere suits for the worship of Mammon.
Yet earth as well as heaven may be largely possessed even now.
Two men walk abroad together. To one the world yields thought after thought of delight; he sees heaven and earth embrace, feels an indescribable presence over and in them, and will break into song afterward in his chamber. To the other, oppressed by his poverty or ruminating how to make much more, the glory of the Lord is only a warm summer day; it enters no window of his soul, for in the very temple of God he looks for no God. Nor need there be two men: one subject to changing mood will see the same world of the same glad creator quite diversely. Alas for us if it changed as we change, if it lost its meaning when we lose faith! Worry for a morrow that may never come, dread of the death that divides yet works for endless companionship, anger with one we love, will cloud the radiant morning. At evening, having bethought ourselves and returned to him who feeds the ravens, watches the dying sparrow, and says to his children ‘Love one another,’ the sunset is glad over us, the western sky as refulgent as the Father’s court when a sinner has repented. We mourned in the twilight of our little faith, but, having sent away our sin, the glory of God’s heaven over his darkening earth has comforted us.