The Poor have good news preached to them. (Matt 11:5)
What is that good news? In this story it is that “the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up.” Luke’s version at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, in the synagogue in Nazareth is a bit different: captives are set free, the blind receive their sight and the oppressed are liberated. That is what it means for Luke to preach the Gospel to the poor. Luke’s gospel is particularly orientated towards the poor, but so is Matthew’s. The manifesto of Jesus’ teaching given in the beatitudes begins, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”. Now you could argue it is possible to be rich in possessions and still poor in spirit. I am sure it is. But the rest of the beatitudes talk of other aspects of being poor: to mourn, to have to be meek, to hunger and thirst after righteousness. Every one of the eight beatitudes can be seen as a mark of the poor.
The extraordinary thing is that each of these marks is described as blessed because in some way or other each will lead to the poor receiving the Kingdom of heaven. That may sound like the usual sop the rich offer the poor: You may be poor now, but don’t worry; when you die you will be rich. To some extent Jesus is saying that. When the Kingdom of heaven comes all will be put right. The difference is that in Jesus, the kingdom of heaven has already come. People are healed; blind people see, the dead are raised up. And today we hear specifically, “Blessed is he who takes no offence at me.” All Jesus’ promises are tied up with His own mission. People who listen to him, believe in him and follow him, will be blessed. That is the new promise of Christian life.
It may sound a bit hackneyed to us, today 2,000 years after it was spoken. In its day it was revolutionary. The Romans and Greeks produced a great civilization of literature, philosophy and government but they were pretty horrible people. There was no compassion in their civilization. No one cared about the poor. The poor deserved to be poor and deserved the consequences. Everyone wanted to be powerful and to be powerful you had to be rich. Stamp on the poor to become rich. Tax them hard and when they can’t pay their taxes, enslave them. That’s what made the Roman Empire great. Christianity changed that. It placed compassion and care of the poor at the heart of its life because that is what God did. God loves the poor and cares for them. We are only imitating God when we care for the poor. That has changed the world. Of course, there have been millions of poor people in the past 2,000 years. There have been many times and many ways in which the Christian church has failed in its ministry to the poor. But there have been great successes, changes of which we can be proud, and ministries which show the world that God really does change people’s lives through care of the weak.
The problem comes, of course, when we think about ourselves. Can we claim to be blessed on the strength of today’s Gospel? If the Gospel is only preached to the poor can we hear it? Is it preached to us? I think most of the people who go to Anglican churches across the country are not poor. People may find money a bit tight but that is not the same as real poverty. Even we, in our monastic life cannot claim to be poor. Individually we own nothing but we eat well, are well heated and have that security which poor people don’t have.
Poverty is a difficult subject for all religious to speak of. I remember a renewal conference I once went to where a speaker said it was no problem getting religious to talk about celibacy or obedience in a calm and civilised fashion, but when you tried to talk about poverty all hell broke loose. Some wanted radical poverty. Some said it wasn’t possible. People argued about the meaning of poverty. Many felt guilty because they weren’t poor. You can imagine the arguments. We have had them here. I am not going into that minefield of telling you what sort of poverty the Community of the Resurrection should have! But there is another kind of poverty, a poverty of spirit.
I think all of us who try seriously to pray think we do it badly. We sit and mutter words or have thoughts. We are surrounded by darkness and fog. I doubt whether we can call it the dark night of the soul, or even the dark night of the senses. It is not that dramatic. It’s just grey. Nothing happens. Do I love God? I don’t feel much love. Does God love me? My head says he does. My feelings don’t pick it up. There are moments when we do feel it, when the light comes on, when it suddenly all seems to be working. We are monks. We are experts in prayer yet we seem to do it so badly. Yet, if we read the great mystics we find this is normal. Our prayer is poor and that is the point. Poor people have no possessions, nothing to show off, nothing to earn their way through life. We are the same with prayer. We have no treasures of prayer by which we can earn a place in the kingdom of God. The further we go the less we seem to have. And this is how it has to be. When we finally come to Christ we will have on our lips those words “Nothing in my hands I bring…” That is important. If I do have things in my hands, things with which to impress God, my hands will not be free to receive the gifts God wants to give me. We need empty hands to receive the grace of God. Nothing can be bought or earned, or even deserved.
It is the same when we come to confession. I suppose all of us will do that in the next week or so. Do we get better? I look back to that 12 year old boy I once was who made his confession before confirmation. Have I got better? I seem to have got nowhere, or got worse! Like George Herbert we find ourselves saying “Love bade me welcome but my soul drew back, guilty of dust and sin…” And yet that is the point of it. The whole point of ascetical life, the point of examining ourselves for confession is to remember that we can’t do it by ourselves. We need Christ. We need him in the same way that a starving man needs food, or a freezing woman needs warmth. Everything from God comes for free but we can’t receive it till we know we need it. That is poverty of spirit.
It sounds rather miserable, doesn’t it? We have to be poor, we have to be weak, we have to be meek, we have to be aware of sin, we have to be desperate for love. And Christianity does have a reputation for being a miserable religion. But it is not true. From the start Christians were full of joy and love. Even pagans saw that as Christians went joyfully to their deaths. Even pagans said “See how these Christians love one another.”
People think monks and nuns must be miserable creatures, dried up haters of the world. They are astonished when they come here and find it is fun! Jesus’ beatitudes seemed crazy to the world he lived in, yet they produced a new civilization which has lasted 2,000 years. Prayer in a Cloud of Unknowing sounds empty and pointless, yet it is curiously addictive. Having found that sort of prayer you don’t want any other.
At the heart of all this is a really important truth. Poverty itself is not good. It can be very bad, turning people into bitter criminals, drug addicts and murderers. Poor people can be very destructive people, as can the rich. But at the heart of the Christian love for poverty is Christ. It is not poverty we extol but the Christ whom we find if we have the courage to go down the road of the poor. The heart of Christian life is Christ; the heart of monastic life is Christ. When we pray we are seeking that Christ, or God himself. That is our first and most important job every day – to set aside the distractions of daily life, enter into that poverty of Spirit and find the Christ who will be our joy.