Pentecost 13
16 August 2026
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
Series: The Sermon on the Mount
THE SPIRITUAL BEGGARS
Matthew 5.3. Mark 10.46-52
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus said, God’s kingdom belongs to them.” That’s how Matthew records the words of Jesus. Luke offers four slightly different beatitudes quoting Jesus as saying, “Blessed are the poor.” One kind of poverty is material; the other spiritual. Neither are desired, and the two are interrelated. Matthew’s “poor in spirit” is not an opening for us to deny the physical and material, political and social reality of Jesus’ teachings. Material poverty and the oppression that often leads to an impoverished spirit is not a blessed state, but an evil reality often delivered by unjust systems.
The “poor in spirit” – is a phrase Jesus uses that refers back to Psalm 34 where those who are crushed in spirit are like the people following Jesus at the end of Matthew chapter four leading up to his Sermon on the Mount. They are the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics – people with no money for medicine and no hope for healing – trapped in an exploitative economic system of taxation and debt, with no control over their own destiny, who were denied resources and justice. Society calls them the losers, the bankrupt, the morally empty, those at the end of their rope. Jesus is not recommending this condition as one we must seek to attain. There’s nothing praiseworthy, noble, good, or honorable about being impoverished materially or spiritually.
However, Jesus says such impoverishment is our entry-way into the kingdom of God. We’ll talk more about “the kingdom” in a moment, but I want to clarify now that when Matthew speaks of the kingdom of heaven and Mark and Luke speak of the kingdom of God, they are speaking of the same reality. Matthew says “heaven” out of his Jewish reverence to avoid saying the name of “God.” But this wording has led people over the centuries to think that the Kingdom of God was only about heaven, about the world to come. And yet, Jesus taught us to pray: “Thy kingdom come . . . on earth as in heaven.” Though the kingdom will not come in its fullness until all creation is restored, the kingdom of which Jesus speaks is a this-world earthly reality where God is healing and restoring the world.
Jesus says, “No one enters the kingdom unless they become like a child.” And a child is characterized by all-out wonder and full-out need. We enter the kingdom, the realm of God’s desire for the world, with our need. This is the beginning of what it means to be “poor-in-spirit.” It’s about the humble acknowledgment of our humanly limits in terms of power, wisdom, and goodness. The poor-in-spirit know themselves to be more empty than full – and that is a good thing. It leads us to an appetite – a hunger and thirst for God. Our emptiness, this poverty of spirit, opens us to grace. When Jesus begins his list of spiritual commendations he does not start with the spiritual giants, the religious know-it-alls, but with the poor-in-spirit.
The wisdom of this first beatitude is captured in the mystery novels of Louise Penny. Senior Inspector Gamache is training a new assistant and says to her: “There are four sentences that lead to wisdom: I don’t know. I need help. I’m sorry. I was wrong.”1 Here is the beginning of wisdom and the humility of the “poor-in-spirit.”
Matthew wants us to know that Jesus cares for those who have been beaten down in all kinds of ways. In this opening public address Jesus begins by emphatically proclaiming God’s favor on the desperate and the marginalized – those who do not usually feel blessed. Perhaps if we’re serious about following Jesus, we should go to impoverished places to meet God’s favored ones. If we want to be on God’s side, then we have to be on the side of those who are hurting. Because faithfully following Jesus into God’s kingdom often means finding ourselves in places that we would not have planned.
And when we suffer, when the world breaks us, when we lose everything we have, Jesus says that’s when God is closest to us. Jesus sees us in our emptiness. He sees us when we’re holding on too tight, when we’re not sure about our next step. He sees us wondering if we fall, will we be okay? And Jesus offers an emphatic “Yes!” For God’s “blessing” means “I am with you, I am on your side.”
Why is this so? I thought God blessed those who make the right confession of faith, the right decisions, those who work hard. Why is Jesus saying that the hurting, the empty, the broken, are the “blessed”? Well, Jesus doesn’t give us much in the way of “why” other than to say “This is what God is like.”
To all who have screwed up, who’ve lost their faith – the blessing of God is yours. The gospel is the announcement that in your bedraggled, confused, morally ambiguous state, God announces, “I’m on your side!” The gospel is the good news that God sent his only Son into the world not to condemn the world but to save it. The gospel is not a list of requirements and demands to get God’s acceptance. Jesus speaks to those of us who are sure that God’s blessing is for someone else and he says: Blessed are you who live with a deep, nagging sense that life is passing you by, that in some profound way you’re not keeping up. Blessed are you when you can’t seem to get it all together, when you constantly feel like you fall short. The kingdom of God has plenty of room for you.
Perhaps the “poor in spirit” experience blessing because they have nothing left, and all they do have amounts to nothing, they have no choice but to hold tight to God, they look for God because their lives depend on it.
Poverty of spirit is the emptiness we sometimes feel that seems impossible to bear. Jason Miller tells of a night his soul was pillaged and he found an unchosen poverty. “That night,” he writes, “the Pandora’s box didn’t just open – it exploded in the inner chamber of my soul, and the vacuum of space took everything, leaving me with nothing within . . . That,” he says, “is how I came to understand what it means to be ‘poor in spirit.’”2
The clearest biblical portrait of “the poor in spirit” is perhaps Bartimaeus, the blind beggar, with no resources of his own, utterly dependant upon the kindness of strangers, seen as a nuisance to his community, and shunned by the religious people. Because if you were blind, the ancient belief was you must have done something wrong and God is punishing you. But ol’ Bart has heard of Jesus, who doesn’t see things that way. And when he hears Jesus approaching, he cries out for help because he has nowhere else to turn: “Lord, have mercy on me.” And Jesus has mercy on him. He blesses this beggar with healing sight.
We are more like Bartimaeus than we care to admit. We are all of us in utter need of God for everything. Think about it: What do you possess that could not be taken away tomorrow? And when we accept the hard truth that nothing lasts (not even our own lives), and that we do not control our own destinies after all; and when like Bartimaeus, we throw ourselves naked and blind and alone at the feet of Christ and pour out our needs like beggars, it is then we walk through the blessed door of God’s kingdom.3 We are all of us beggars in need of God’s grace.
When we feel vulnerable and in need of help, those thoughts and voices that shame us come not from the God who loves you. They come from a culture bound to the lie of self-sufficiency.
Recovering alcoholics admit utter powerlessness over alcohol, and they believe that only submission to a higher power can get them back on their feet again. If alcohol is not your particular problem, you can substitute your addiction or obsession, your predicament . . . and confess your poverty of spirit.
Marshall Jenkins writes: Poverty of spirit rises up in the boldness of one admitting they have nothing left to lose.4 And this confession by Jim Forest: Poverty of spirit is my awareness that I cannot save myself, that I am basically defenseless, that neither money nor power can spare me from suffering and death, and that no matter what I achieve or acquire in this life, I know I need God’s help and mercy more than I need anything else.5
Jesus blesses those who know they don’t have all the answers, those whose lives are full of broken dreams, those who are lonely and suffering. You are blessed when you admit that life overwhelms you, that you cannot go on without God’s help and the help of others. And in such a moment, you are not on the brink of failure, you are on the brink of faith.6
Henri Nouwen says the great task then becomes that of allowing the blessedness to touch us in our brokenness.7 In A Farewell to Arms Earnest Hemingway wrote: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” Jesus says: When life breaks us, we are blessed at the broken places. And Paul quotes Jesus who said to Paul in the midst of his helplessness: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in your weakness.” In other words: God helps those who cannot help themselves. To those who acknowledge their utter need, their poverty of spirit, the kingdom, Jesus says, belongs to them.
One day, says scripture, “the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.” And the world to come will be the final healing, the final blessing. But the kingdom of God Jesus taught was about Heaven coming to us here on earth. The kingdom of God Jesus preached was an “upside down kingdom” which is turning the world right-side up.
The religious system of Jesus’ day left the multitudes out, but he welcomed them all into his kingdom. Anyone could come as well as any other. They still can. That is the gospel of the Beatitudes. Are you so crushed you see no way to put your life back together? The beatitudes announce that God’s grace is yours. The gospel is that when you’ve blown it God’s love can handle it. We find the gospel when we crash.
If your pride has taken a fall, if you have known failure and have nothing to show but your need for God’s grace – Congratulations! You are empty enough to be filled. Perhaps we must empty ourselves before there is room for God. It’s been said that “God cannot fill our cups with the Water of Life until they have been drained of all other waters.”8 The healing begins when we simply embrace the empty place within us and stop trying to fill it with substitutes. Maybe even stop trying to fill it with God, too. Because God is already there – in the emptiness calling us into the kingdom.
The kingdom Frederick Buechner lyrically describes this way: If we only had eyes to see and ears to hear and wits to understand, we would know that the kingdom of God in the sense of holiness, goodness, beauty is as close as breathing and is crying out to be born both within ourselves and within the world; we would know that the kingdom of God is what we all of us hunger for above all other things even when we don’t know its name or realize that it’s what we are starving to death for. The Kingdom of God is where our best dreams come from and our truest prayers. We glimpse it at those moments when we find ourselves being better than we are and wiser than we know. We catch sight of it when at some moment of crisis a strength seems to come to us that is greater than our own strength. The Kingdom of God is where we belong. It is home, and whether we realize it or not, I think we are all of us homesick for it.9
Are you homesick? Is there a sadness within that leaves your very soul impoverished and begging for help? Then lie down at the feet of Jesus, my friend, and you will find yourself at home in the kingdom of God where all are welcome and God’s boundless love reigns supreme. Blessed are you the spiritual beggars, those at the end of your hope, the kingdom of God is yours. Welcome home!
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- Louise Penny, Still Life, St. Martin’s Minotaur Press, 2008.
- Jason Adam Miller, When the World Breaks, FaithWords Press, 2023, 33
- Marshall Jenkins, Blessed at the Broken Places Skylight Paths, 2016, 6
- Jenkins, 2
- Jim Forest, The Ladder of the Beatitudes, Orbis Books, 1999, 22
- Jenkins, 9-10
- Nouwen quoted in Jenkins, xvii
- Rebekah Eklund, The Beatitudes Through the Ages, Eerdmans, 2025, 76
- Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry, HarperCollins, 1992, 152