Whom does Jesus call the blessed people? First of all, he says, they are the "poor in spirit." And who are the poor in spirit? It sometimes seems as if Christians thought that to be poor in spirit one must be poor-spirited—a limp and spiritless creature, without dash, or vigor, or force. But the poor in spirit are not the poor-spirited. They are simply the teachable, the receptive, the people who want help and are conscious of need. They do not think they "know it all;" they appreciate their own insufficiency. They are open-minded and impressionable. Now Jesus says that the first approach to his blessedness is in this teachable spirit. The hardest people for him to reach were always the self-sufficient people. The Pharisees thought they did not need anything, and so they could not get anything. As any one thinks, then, of his own greatest blessings, the first of them must be {59} this,—that somehow he has been made open-minded to the good. It may be that the conceit has been, as we say, knocked out of him, and that he has been "taken down." Well! it is better to be taken down than to be still up or "uppish." It is better to have the self-complacency knocked out of you than to have it left in. Humility, as Henry Drummond once said, even when it happens through humiliation, is a blessing. Not to the Pharisee with his "I am not as other men are," but to the publican crying "God be merciful to me, a sinner," comes the promise of the beatitude. The first condition of receiving the gift of God is to be free from the curse of conceit. The spiritually poor are the first to receive Christ's blessing. They have at least made themselves accessible to the further blessings which Jesus has to bestow.
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XXIII
THE MOURNERS
Matthew v. 4.
Whom does Jesus call the blessed people? How strange it sounds when he answers: "Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted." Blessed, that is to say, are not only the people who, as we say, are in sorrow; but blessed are all the burdened people, the people who are having a hard time, the people who are bearing their crosses, for they are the ones who will learn the deeper comfort of the Gospel. It is the same promise which is repeated later in another place: "Come unto me all ye that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." This does not mean that mourning is blessed for its own sake, or that the only way to be a Christian is to be sad. It simply calls attention to this fact, that every life is sure to have some hardness, or burden, or cross in it. If you have none, it simply shows that you have not really begun to live. And Jesus says that the farther you go into {61} these deep places of experience, the more you will get out of his religion. There are some phases of life where it makes little difference whether you have any religion or not. But let the water of trouble go over your soul, and then there is just one support which keeps you from going down. Religion, that is to say, is not a thing for holidays and easy times. Its comfort is not discovered until you come to a hard place. The more it is needed, the stronger it is. How strange it is that the people who seem most conscious of their blessings and sustained by a sense of gratitude are, as a rule, people who have been called to mourn. It is not resignation only which they have found; it is light. They have been comforted through their sorrows. Their burden has been made easy and their yoke light.
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XXIV
THE MEEK.
Matthew v. 5.