The Beatitudes Are Not Virtues

A little rant about our relentless tendency to try and turn the Beatitudes into nice ways to be, when that’s not what they are at all…

“Happy are those who are hopeless, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs.”

That’s how the Common English Bible translates the first of Jesus’s Beatitudes in Matthew 5. Most translations name them as “the poor in spirit.” But I like “those who are hopeless” because it is closer to the real meaning of the Beatitudes.

We get the Beatitudes wrong ALL THE TIME. So much of the commentary on the Beatitudes assumes they are essentially virtues. Good ways to be. Commendable states to seek. Which is telling, because it seems we cannot imagine God blessing someone unless they have somehow “deserved” it through their laudable behavior or praiseworthy state of being. We hear Jesus proclaim “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and assume that being “poor in spirit” must be good, because why else would Jesus bless someone.

But the Beatitudes are not virtues. Not that virtues aren’t worth seeking. They clearly are, but the point of the Beatitudes is not the same as the point of the virtue lists in Ephesians or Colossians that enlighten believers in how to practice this new way of life they find themselves caught up in because they are in Christ (“Put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience”).

The Beatitudes aren’t prescriptions, they’re simply proclamations. Announcements of sheer grace; blessing for those who have been told their whole lives they weren’t worth God’s time and weren’t on God’s mind. Jesus announces blessing to these specific people, the ones in front of him, listening to him talk about God’s kingdom, because they thought they were outside the circle of the chosen. Dallas Willard coined the term “hopeless unblessables”1 for these people who had been ground to dust under the boot of oppressive power and told repeatedly that they were the scum of the earth who deserved all the suffering they endured.

Jesus looks at these hopeless unblessables and says, “Guess what? You’re the salt of the earth. You’re the light of the world. You’ve inherited the abundance of the kingdom. You have encountered the blessing of God’s kingdom right here and now, despite your poverty of spirit, despite your weeping, despite your timidity, despite the injustice done to you, despite every aspect of your condition that has been used as an explanation for keeping you away from flourishing. God is bypassing that whole system and meeting you right here in the wilderness, away from the temple, and conferring the abundance and authority of the kingdom upon you.”

It still astonishes me that we’ve somehow managed to turn these grace-drenched proclamations of good news for the marginalized into a bland, status-quo-reinforcing technology for blessing, a kind of prosperity gospel, insipid ways to turn the announcement of God’s prodigal love into just another status game to find out who’s better than who. How silly.