“Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
“Blessed are those who mourn.”
“Blessed are the meek.”
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.” (from Matthew 5:2-5)
These are some of the opening lines from Jesus’ ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ and they’re amongst the most familiar words Jesus ever spoke. I’ve stopped halfway through the list of blessings, but I suspect you can complete the rest from memory, including the cheesemakers, who should always get an honorary mention.
These are ‘the Beatitudes’, and you’ll find them in the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. You’ll also find them printed on any number of posters, bookmarks, and inspirational calendars—often framed by a sunrise, implying that these are words designed to soothe and uplift.
Moreover, I’ve found these verses to be amongst the favourites quoted by preachers of the ‘prosperity gospel’, which claims that God wants to make all of us rich by blessing our efforts as entrepreneurs in God’s own free-market capitalist system.
I remember many years ago I purchased a translation of the Bible that had been published by some of these people. It was called “The Positive Bible,” and it promised “all the good stuff and nothing else”. It also said on the inside cover that you could read their whole translation in about half an hour, which I thought spoke for itself.
You’ve got to cut out a lot of the Scriptures before you can end up with a Bible that depicts God as your business partner. Even so, whatever they cut out, they left these ‘BE-attitudes’ in, as these were the sort of ‘attitudes’ you needed to ‘BE’ if you want to become the healthy, wealthy, and wise person God wants you to BE.
In truth, to get this from the Christian Scriptures, you not only have to cut a lot of the Bible out. You also need to trim down this list of beatitudes, which concludes with “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you” (Matthew 5:11). That’s not even an attitude, and, moreover, what sense does it make to say that you are being blessed when you are being cursed?
In truth, the more closely I listen to these words, the more difficult they become.
The people listed here are not those that we would normally describe as “blessed”, let alone (as some translations would render it) ‘happy’. Indeed, in almost every culture—including our own—these are the people we pity, avoid, and often think of as cursed! How can poverty be a blessed state? How can being sad make you happy?
I think, as a starting point, we need to drop the idea that Jesus is offering us a self-improvement programme here. This is not a list of spiritual techniques for becoming wealthy, successful and triumphant. If anything, these Beatitudes dismantle the idea that prosperity is a sign of divine favour. They point in the opposite direction.
The poor, the grieving and the persecuted are blessed, not because their circumstances make them happy, but because God is with them in their struggle. Their blessing is not their poverty or pain, but the presence of God in their pain.
This is the great reversal at the heart of the Gospel. This is the God that Jesus reveals to us – a God who is to be found not at the top but at the bottom – not in triumph but in struggle. Not in the palaces of the powerful, but among those who hunger for justice and cling to hope.
The prosperity gospel imagines God as a kind of celestial operations manager, rewarding all those who have the right kind of faith with worldly success. But the Jesus who speaks to us here from a Galilean hillside says something far more radical – that God has already chosen where to stand and is standing alongside those who have nothing to offer but their need.
In truth, the Beatitudes aren’t really attitudes at all, and they’re not even primarily about us. The Beatitudes speak to us of the location of God.
Where is God? Not at the top with the successful, but at the bottom with the broken.
Not with the powerful, but with the powerless. Not with those who have everything, but with those who have nothing but their need.
This is the great reversal at the heart of the Gospel. The Beatitudes invite us to look for God in the places we least expect—in grief, in disappointment, in the long and bitter struggle for justice, in the quiet perseverance of those who refuse to give up.
If we find ourselves poor, grieving, or pained at injustice, these words are a promise to us that God is near. And if, on the other hand, our lives are comfortable, insulated, and untroubled, perhaps these words are an invitation to adjust our be-attitudes, and to take a step closer to the places where God has chosen to dwell.
First shared in Father Dave’s blog – January 31st, 2026
