Matt. 5:3-4 ... "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."
In Mat. 5:3-12, at the opening of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus presents eight features of the kind of personality He wants His disciples to have. He then promises a blessing upon the person who will build these features into his thinking and consequent behavior. A blessing is paired with each of these features, so that the quality of the person's life is enriched and lifted to a higher plane. A view has developed in the popular explanation of this passage that "blessed" means "happy," and thus it is translated in some recent versions of the New Testament. A more careful examination shows this view to betray the essential idea in Jesus' meaning. "Happy" is from the root word "hap," which denotes chance and its random nature. But a blessing is not the product of chance; it is a measure of God's grace received. A person who is blessed has a reason to be happy, but a person can be blessed without being happy. Many is the time in a Christian's experience when the roughness of life is stressful and unplea-sant, but God's blessing is still with him, if he perseveres in faith and trust in God's providence. Clouds of trouble often darken the lives of God's people, but He will eventually part the clouds. and the sun-shine of His goodness will bring light and joy. So, it may be said ... A Christian's life will pass from sorrow and oppression to joy and exaltation, but at all times God's blessings are present. I advise that we not replace Jesus' word "blessed" with the weak and shallow, but very popular term, "happy."
The character trait that appears in the first beatitude is humility: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven." A person who is "poor in spirit" is an humble person who does not put himself before others. He is always concerned about the situation of people around him, especially if they are having difficulty. He does not consider himself to be more worthy, more deserving, and more fitting than others. He recognizes value in everyone, believes they are due consideration, and seeks to find a good place for them in a given context. There are numerous times in Jesus ministry where He is found paying attention to the needs, the pain, and the welfare of people. He reacted to their misery and deprivation by relieving their pain and bringing them into the mainstream of productive, meaningful life experience.
The character trait in the seond beatitude is sorrow: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." This does not mean being sorrowful about disease, accidents, losses, backsets, and those kinds of afflictions that life deals out to everyone. Jesus speaks of the sorrow one feels because of the great prevalence of sin in the world that is continually devastating the lives of everyone, including one's own life. Because every soul is made in God's image, because one soul is worth more than all the world, and because a soul is something eternal, one should feel great sorrow that sin constantly invades the soul. It is a spiritual contagion that sickens its victim in the worst way, in the part of his being that exists forever, beginning in this world and continuing through eternity.
The attitude of the common worldly individual is, "It's every one for himself, and let the devil take the hindermost." This prevailing attitude is the opposite to the character trait revealed in the second beatitude. It is a grievous character flaw. The further a sinner is removed from us, the less we care about him, and the better we feel because he is at a distance. We rarely look at him with sorrow and have much concern that his soul is wrecked and headed into a dreadful, hopeless oblivion. Jesus had no sin, and therefore He could not sorrow over sin ruining Him. But the New Testament is replete with examples of the sorrow Jesus had for someone else whose life was being blasted and wasted by the action of sin within him.
