Last night our Faith Study group met for the second time, we cancelled last week because of the weather. We looked at Chapter Two of What Jesus Meant: The Beatitudes and a Meaningful Life by Minister and Therapist Erik Kolbell. This chapter focused on the verse “Blessed are the Poor in Spirit.” Our 90-minute sessions are divided in three; 30 minutes for me to summarize the chapter (most of the 25 people present had just received the book), then another 30 minutes for the 25 people to break into 5 groups of 5, and 30 minutes for one representative from each group to share the content of their conversation and some questions that may have arisen. When the groups meet in separate rooms they are all given a question about the chapter.
I shared with the large group that Kolbell offers a reason why Luke writes, “Blessed are the poor” and Matthew records “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Most commentators, like Kolbell, believe the difference speaks of whom these two Gospel writers have in mind. The Luke lens is one of inclusion; women, children, gentiles, the sick, and the poor, all part of Jesus’ vision for the New Kingdom of God. Matthew’s intent is slightly different, he is offering the wisdom, the sacred teachings, the gems of faith, that Jesus gave to his disciples and the crowds who followed him, all the way to the Cross. Matthew’s Gospel has a wider audience, it is intended for the poorest and wealthiest, and those in between.
For the wealthy Kolbell reveals this nugget of wisdom, “Perhaps you are feeling melancholy, thinking you are getting older and forgetful. Perhaps you worry that the flattery you receive is not sincere, that it is patronizing. Perhaps the riches you have accumulated offer diminishing happiness. For the poor Kolbell reveals this nugget of wisdom, “s/he glories at the prospect of a life lived beyond the hell of poverty and all s/he associates with it, for her/his poverty of spirit is a lack of things, but it is also the degradation and diminution of self-worth that accompanies that lack. S/he despises pity.” For both “Spiritual poverty means we stand empty before God and naked to the world with absolutely nothing to either commend or condemn me, we refuse to see ourselves as the sum total of the heft of our resumes and credentials, the breadth of our riches or the extent of our debt, the quality of our friends or the distain of our enemies.”
Henri Nouwen once said, “We cannot be liberated from something without being liberated to something else.”
And for Kolbell that “something else” we need to be liberated to is grace. “It is ultimately the unmerited love of God that defines us and gives us enduring value…To be poor in spirit is to know that we are all alive by the grace of God, that none of us has earned our way into creation.”
Finally, Kolbell ends his chapter with a story about Oseola McCarty.