Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. (Matthew 5:8)
When I first hear this, I think: well I guess I will never see God. To be completely pure in heart?! Who could be pure in heart? Who could be completely clean in their spirit? Who could be totally blameless at their core?
And then I think back to the first beatitude, “blessed are the beggars of the spirit…” (Cole’s translation). I’ve felt more and more liberated by this idea of being a beggar or mendicant of the spirit. It’s enlivening to give up the control of grace: both in how I receive it and who else does too! It’s God’s work. God’s gift. God’s desire for the world that all can be made pure.
How do the ideas of being a “beggar of the spirit” and “pure in heart” relate to you? Do they feel interconnected? Maybe they don’t. How are they different?
The Message paraphrase of the Bible opens this verse up a little more for me: “You’re blessed when get your inside world — your mind and heart — put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.”
The next time Jesus uses the word “pure” in the gospel of Matthew is in chapter 23 when he goes on an absolute rager against the religious elite (take cover, clergy!). Jesus spends 24 verses talking about how those in religious power are so worried about cleaning up how they appear, “the outside of the cup,” that they’ve completely neglected the inside. They care more about how they seem to the world (holy and “pure”) but their hearts, the way they are making decisions is guided by selfishness and ambition.
Because of this impurity, this conflation of priorities, they didn’t care (not really) about their communities, the very ones Jesus was calling “blessed” in chapter 5. This broke Jesus’ heart. As soon as he is done yelling at them, he turns towards Jerusalem and laments — his heart broken. He describes wanting to gather them “like a hen gathers her chicks under her wings” (Matthew 23:37).
This is where the verse from the beatitude comes alive to me: purity of the spirit, of our hearts, of our souls, that is God’s work. When we allow ourselves to be gathered under God’s wings, we become clean, made holy, we are given grace. When we try to do it alone, we always get trapped in the same ego trap as the religious elite, those who Jesus was railing against.
Richard Rohr says, “Only from the place of emptiness can we receive God. The ego can’t do the Beatitudes. Only the soul can.”1 In United Methodist Church theology there is a way of thinking about God that says God always acts first, we react to God’s grace. That’s all we can do, react, be open, to God’s already-there-grace working in us and in the world.
Maybe being “pure in heart” is about giving up trying to be good by ourselves. Maybe being clean on the inside is about receiving grace far more than it is striving for holiness. Maybe who Jesus called blessed were those were done trying to do anything outside of God.
May you be blessed with the purity of receiving grace, a grace that’s already there. May you be blessed with the gift of letting go of control, just a little will do. May you be blessed with an aliveness to those who have let God cover them under wing, and the grace they radiate. May you be open to how God is always at work desiring you. May you take in that desire, God’s own desire for you, and may you be made pure because of it. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
- Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps (Cincinnati: Franciscan Media, 2012), 30. ↩︎
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