Matthew 5:6
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
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Matthew 5:2–11
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
I’ve spent quite a lot of time over the last year musing on the Beatitudes—Jesus’s famous sayings that begin with “Blessed are the…”. This is such a well-known passage of Scripture, sometimes described as Jesus’s manifesto, and yet it is often so little applied.
Jesus turns received wisdom on its head. In Jesus’s teaching, it is not the powerful, rich, healthy, and happy who are blessed, but the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted for righteousness or reviled in Jesus’s name.
Why do the poor in spirit receive the kingdom of heaven? Because it is almost impossible to receive something if we don’t know we need it.
To be poor in spirit is to recognise our own powerlessness; from that point, we can truly know God.
Our CAP Debt Centre will be five years old in August. It was five years ago that I began training to be a debt centre manager—training which had to be rapidly moved online due to the first COVID lockdown.
As I look back over the last five years of working with people who are in unmanageable debt, I am struck by how ignorant I was about the impact of poverty when I first started this role.
I had no real understanding of how our society is structured to keep the rich rich, or of how poorly the welfare system works as a safety net for those in need. I had no idea how much is stacked against many of the people I work with, or about the systemic judgment that they so often receive just for being poor.
There is still a prevalent belief that you can only be poor if you’re lazy—that is definitely not true!
When people ask about this work, I always say that it is humbling—and I really mean that. I had no idea how much privilege I experience as a middle-class, university-educated, white woman. I always believed that, inherently, the world is fair—it is not!
You’re probably now thinking, “Well, that’s obvious,” but is it? Unless we get outside the bubbles that we live in and really get to know people who have quite different backgrounds and circumstances to us, I don’t think we ever truly can see.
I’m currently supporting one person whose abusive ex-partner keeps taking out credit in her name. This is identity fraud, but the companies involved are not interested when she tries to stop it—yes, the police have been involved.
I’m supporting someone else who is in rent arrears because they said yes to doing overtime at work, which meant that their Housing Benefit was stopped. They have poor literacy skills and so didn’t understand the letters that they were sent about it.
We support someone else who has been without heating and hot water for months because it is too difficult for their energy company to upgrade their meter in their social housing.
I hope these things make you angry—they make me angry.
Justice isn’t just a social issue, it’s at the core of who God is (Isaiah 61:8 “For I, the Lord, love justice; I hate robbery and wrongdoing.”.
Back to the Beatitudes, to the upside-down Kingdom of God (or right-side up from the Christian view): those who are rich, powerful, and successful in this world have already received worldly blessings.
Those who are poor in spirit, mourning, or meek are perfectly positioned to be blessed in the kingdom of heaven.
Let’s be people who are meek—acknowledging our need of Jesus and allowing His presence to change us into people who are merciful, peacemakers, and hungry for righteousness—so that the poor in our city get to experience Jesus’s kingdom through His Spirit working in us.
Please pray for the debt centre, for the work that we do, and for plenty of volunteers to go with us to visit clients.
Pray that we won’t get jaded or weary from all the injustice that we see, but that we will grow more hungry for righteousness in our city.
The Beatitudes give a clear mandate to God’s church to be merciful, to stand up for justice, and to be focused on the blessings in the kingdom of heaven rather than the short-term blessings of power, status, and wealth that this world is so preoccupied with.
Charlotte
Charlotte Walker