The Blessedness of Spiritual Bankruptcy

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Matthew 5:3

Do you consider hopelessness as a prerequisite for salvation?

The truth is, before we can drink from the fountain of God’s abundant and saving grace, we must first despair of the existence of any other fountain.

The Gospel is not for people who have options. It is for those who have no more cards to play. It is for those who truly despair of their fate. And Jesus calls out this principle as He opens the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5. The first words out of His mouth to the crowd gathered are “Blessed are the poor in spirit…“

The Poor in Spirit

Tim Keller points out that many Western Christians today are “middle-class in spirit” and therefore lack the transforming power of grace in their lives. They “don’t believe [they] are so sinful, morally bankrupt, and lost that only free grace can possibly save [them]”¹ They have not lost all hope. They still have options. They still have a good record that surely must earn them some points with God.

The people to whom Jesus was teaching in Matthew 5 lived in a culture that differed in many ways from ours. But both first-century Jewish culture and twenty-first-century Western culture share this: an affection (or perhaps, an addiction) for meritocracy. The Jewish religious system was centered around the law and the ruling class: the Pharisees, were in their position of power thanks to their rigorous adherence to that law.

Likewise, American culture glorifies those who make something for themselves. We earned our place of prominence in the world. We cherish the earning. We pride ourselves in being a land where a person is judged on their merit, not their family’s wealth, their connections or their pedigree. (Whether the system really works that way or not is a different question.)

Regardless of the comparative material wealth or poverty of ancient Judea and the United States, we both share a sense of entitlement to what we’ve earned. And to be honest, this is the case for the entire human population, regardless of culture.

But Jesus does not bless those who have options. He blesses the crouching spiritual beggars² who have lost all hope in any option but flinging themselves onto the street and hoping beyond hope for the generosity of a stranger. Begging for money is vulnerable enough. But becoming a spiritual beggar is the most vulnerable act of all. For it is there that we are giving up all agency for the meeting of our deepest need. We are utterly vulnerable because the greatest need of our being—the secure rest of our souls—is entirely in the hands of another.

And to these vulnerably impoverished and bankrupt in spirit, God pronounces an astounding blessing: the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Kingdom of Heaven

Jesus talks about the Kingdom of Heaven throughout the Gospels and the rest of Scripture. But one place we will examine in particular has to do with this connection with spiritual poverty and the abandonment of all other options for salvation outside Christ.

In Matthew 20, Jesus tells a parable about a master of a house who owns a vineyard and hires laborers to tend to it. Early in the morning he finds some and agrees to a fair wage for the day’s work. Throughout the day, he continues to hire more laborers. He continues hiring laborers up until the close of the day, the 11th hour (around 5pm). After the day’s work is done he pays his laborers starting with the new hires. He pays them each a denarius, the day’s wage. The early hires are frustrated though. They grumble to the master of the house, saying “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” (Matt. 20:12)

The point of the parable is clear: God will give to whom He wills and any of our perceptions of what is “fair” or what is “earned” hold no weight with Him. Jesus is saying that the Kingdom of Heaven is a free gift of grace that is not dependent on the work the recipients have done to earn it.

The truth is, God does not often act in accordance with our idea of fairness and we ought to certainly be thankful that He doesn’t.

Jesus tells the crowds in Matthew 5 that the poor in spirit, who understand their truly helpless condition and embrace the vulnerability of being incapable to earn anything on their own, will receive the Kingdom of Heaven, the free gift of grace, because they have no perception of fairness or meritocracy holding them back.

It is so easy for our merit-driven, entitled, earning hearts to drift away from the vulnerable faith that depends wholly on God’s grace. But God promises that when we embrace our own inadequacy, our own poverty and spiritual bankruptcy, will we experience the transforming power of free grace and the Kingdom of Heaven with all the riches it holds.

¹Generous Justice, by Tim Keller

²The word translated “poor” in Matthew 5:3 has its root in the word for “crouch” as in the context of begging.