Week 18 - Matthew 5

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

To understand the “poor in spirit” you only need to understand the Hebrew word anawin. The best way to understand this word is to remember what happened to the inhabitants of Israel when they were hauled into captivity to Babylon. If you were smart, talented, healthy and useful you were taken captive to be used in a productive way by the Babylonians. If you were totally useless, you were simply left behind. Talk about an insult, to be told by your enemy that “Everyone useful will be taken, but we do not need you.” The word for these people were, the anawin. They were the nobodies; the poor, pitiful, pathetic, worthless, useless nobodies.

The fact is, we are all going to have some of those nobody moments in our lives. There will be those times we feel worthless and useless and are unable to control or change the situation. As a freshman in high school it was being the last one chosen for the pick-up football game during PE. As a senior it was being told by your dream date that you are the last person on earth she would go out with and then finding out the whole school knows of the rejection. As a high school graduate it is being rejected by your top ten college choices for “academic reasons”. Those moments only get more serious as life continues. It is your child facing a life threatening illness, a family member with multiple sclerosis, a business going under despite everything you can do, a mate that leaves you for someone else, a depression that destroys who you are. The list goes on but the fact is, sooner or later we all face a brokenness in our lives that far exceeds the resources we have in and of ourselves to address and repair it, and few things are more discouraging than the realization that we do not have what it takes to make ourselves or those that we love whole.

Jesus’ first words in this sermon are not about our physical condition, but rather our spiritual. Blessed are those who understand their condition without God and what they can be with God; Those who will empty themselves in order that they might be filled with God; Those who accept their position as a nobody, in order that God might make them a somebody. Blessed are the broken.

—David Swanger