The Who Not You: Grammar in the Beatitudes Matthew 5:3
I have always been confused and bothered by the first of the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:3. Jesus begins his famous sermon by saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Through my lens of Christianity, I have never been able to nail down who the poor in spirit are. Why would anyone want to be poor in something like the spirit, and then why would God bless them and give them the kingdom of heaven? This verse not only confused me, but it annoyed me because I did not view myself as someone who was poor in spirit, therefore according to Matthew 5:3, God would not bless me or give me the kingdom of heaven. I have never categorized myself as poor in spirit, but as I began to analyze the grammar of this verse and passage, I have realized that maybe I have been interpreting this verse incorrectly.
This verse starts the paralleled list of Beatitudes that all begin with the past participle blessed. This sentence has a reversed syntax because the adjective complement, begins the sentence and is followed by the verb is and the subject poor. If the sentence was de-transformed to say: “The poor in spirit are blessed”, the syntax would highlight the subject. By beginning the sentence with the adjective complement, the focus becomes the One blessing the poor in spirit. It does not matter that the poor in spirit are blessed; all that is important is the Who doing the blessing. The primary focus of the Beatitudes is what God has blessed us with, not what we have done.
In the second phrase of this compound, parallel sentence, Jesus explains the blessing He has bestowed on the poor in spirit. The word for acts as a conjunction joining the two sentences and helps explain the reason for the blessing. This second sentence also has an uncommon syntax because theirs is used as the subject. Modern English speakers and writers rarely use the possessive pronoun theirs as a subject, but more frequently make it a noun complement. This sentence could be reworded to sound clearer by reversing the syntax: “for the kingdom of heaven is theirs”. Again, it seems that even when the possessive pronoun theirs begins the sentence, God is still the focus of the phrase because He has giving the poor in spirit ownership of His kingdom.
When I began analyzing the determiner, subject, and adjectival prepositional phrase in the poor in spirit, I still had issues with the phrase’s literal premise. According to Strong’s Greek Dictionary the meaning of the word spirit goes back to the Greek word pnuemati, meaning wind or breath. Pnuema is translated throughout the Bible as Spirit, breath, wind, spirits, and spiritual. God uses the same root word to describe all of these concepts that we see as distinct from one another. Jesus seems to be saying what many of us, including me, do not want Him to be saying: that He will bless those who do not have much of Himself in them. Again, a lack of the Spirit is not a spiritual goal of many Christians. We want and claim to be full of the spirit. We place our spiritual status above anyone who we judge as not being spiritual enough. We are completely missing Jesus’ promise. His mercy and grace seep through this passage, yet I have never noticed because I was too concerned with myself. Maybe I or even all of us are poor in His spirit. Certainly compared to Jesus, we have no spirituality to boast in. Still He lovingly reminds us that He will give us His kingdom, even though we will fail to realize that life is not about us.
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