Matthew 5:1-3 (NIV)
Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them, saying:

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

Jesus begins His Sermon on the Mount with a series of what have commonly called “beatitudes,” which comes from the Latin word “beatus,” which means “blessed.”  A lot has been written about the beatitudes, some of which encourages people to have the “attitudes” that Jesus says will be blessed.  But in my opinion, Jesus is NOT telling us about attitudes that we are to have in order to be blessed; He is just telling us truths about people and the way the kingdom of heaven actually works.

The first beatitude, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” actually would have been quite disturbing to many of the people who first heard it, turning conventional wisdom on its head!  It was a “known fact” in those days that the people who were most blessed by God, the ones who would inherit the kingdom of heaven, were the “spiritual giants,” those whose faith and practice were above reproach.  Chief among these in the peoples’ opinion were the Pharisees.  Despite the negative opinion most people have of Pharisees these days, the average people of Jesus’ day looked up to them greatly, because they were considered the spiritual giants.  They knew every commandment in the Old Testament in minute detail, and they took such great pains to scrupulously obey even the smallest hint of each commandment.  The average person probably despaired of ever being able to know as much or to be as outright holy as even the lowest of the Pharisees, so they figured that, as far as God’s blessings were concerned, they would probably have to be content with the leftover scraps.

But here was Jesus, telling them that the ones who were truly blessed by God were the “poor in spirit,” the spiritually bankrupt, those who had no hope of ever winning God’s approval by their own righteous acts.  Paul Simon, in his 1965 song, Blessed, actually captured a little bit of this truth when he wrote, among other things, “Blessed are the sat upon, Spat upon, Ratted on; Blessed are the meth drinkers, Pot sellers, Illusion dwellers; Blessed are the penny rookers, Cheap hookers, Groovy lookers.”

It’s very easy to experience almost a sense of revulsion when you read a list like that, under the heading of “blessed.”  Our inmost being cries out, “NO!  Those people aren’t blessed by God, and can’t be blessed by God!  Most of them are terrible sinners!”  But in a very real sense, that’s the whole point that Jesus is making.

The point about the Kingdom that Jesus was trying to make is that the most righteous people of His day, the Pharisees, who relied on their own righteousness to earn God’s favor, actually end up exculding themselves from the kingdom of heaven.  As the Scriptures say, “all our righteous acts are like filthy rags.” (Isaiah 64:6 NIV)  If we are so confident of our own ability to be righteous enough for heaven, then we will have only our own righteous acts, filthy rags, to present before the throne of God at the judgment.  On the other hand, those who are spiritually bankrupt, those who have no deeds of righteousness to present before God, will throw themselves at the feet of God, begging for His mercy, because they know that they have no other hope.

The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:10-14 NIV) makes the same point:
“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men–robbers, evildoers, adulterers–or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ 
“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ 
“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

The reason that the tax collector, a man with no righteous deeds to his name at all, was recieved by God was precisely because of his stance before God – no trying to show God why God should be indebted to him – simply throwing himself at the feet of the God who is the judge of all mankind, begging for mercy, because it is the only hope of salvation that he has.

When we come before God, there is no hope for us if we think of ourselves a spiritual giants, someone whose good works have made them a shoo-in for the kingdom of heaven.  Instead, the only way to get into the kingdom is to realize that we are spiritually bankrupt on our own, totally unable to do a single good deed that would earn God’s favor, and completely dependent on the mercy of God.  If we come that way, poor in spirit, we will receive the same welcome that the repentant Zacchaeus received when he turned from his wicked ways to the only one who could show him the life- and soul-saving mercy that he knew he needed:  “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.” (Luke 19:9-10 NIV)