‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.’
Well, I know that’s not me, but who could it be? And whoever they are, what are they doing there in Matthew 5, ranged together with all those down-and-out type folks: the poor in spirit, the bereaved, the meek, the hungry (literal or otherwise), and those lax permissive pushovers the merciful and those weakling cowards the peacemakers, and those inconvenient truth-tellers – people like John the Baptist – who offend the mighty at their peril?
Spot the odd beatitude out.
As Sue Chin pointed out last week, most of the beatitudes confront us with paradox, with unexpected reversal: where, afterall, is the blessing in being grief-stricken, or weak, or persecuted? But, now we have to ask, where is the paradox in this beatitude? It sounds perfectly conventional, even if it does set the bar rather high (out of reach, some might say). ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.’ Who else would see God?
Well, guess what. I’m going to try to persuade you that this is a beatitude of reversal like all the others, and that the pure in heart referred to here are … wait for it … children – primarily children, anyway, but possibly some other people as well, such as people with learning disabilities and people with serious mental illnesses – people who, like children, were exempt from observing Jewish law on the grounds that they could not distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil.
So, what has given me this harebrained idea (and it may be harebrained; I can’t promise you that it isn’t)? My inspiration comes from a passage much later in Matthew’s gospel in which Jesus has some very interesting and, to me, bizarre things to say about children.
Some of this will sound very familiar. In chapter 18 the disciples ask Jesus who will be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. In answer, Jesus calls a child to him, places the child in the middle of their discussion, and says, ‘Truly, I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.’
So far so good; nothing out of the ordinary. We are used to these verses, as all three of the synoptic gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – include this incident.
But then, a few verses later, in a passage that’s only in Matthew, Jesus adds this strange detail: ‘Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones; for, I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven.’
I’ll read that bit again: ‘Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones; for, I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven.’
Really?
What the heck is Jesus talking about? He’s referring here to two aspects of Jewish cosmology as it had come to be elaborated in his day. First, with the phrase ‘their angels’, he is invoking the idea that every human being has an angelic celestial twin. (You may not have noticed it, but this idea also appears in the Book of Acts [12.15]: when Peter’s friends suppose that he is in prison, they think it must be his angelic twin when he shows up knocking at their door). Second, Jesus is alluding to an image of heaven as a vast, hierarchical royal court at which only the highest-ranking angels – the Angels of Presence – see God face to face in his inner throne room.
Now, I’m not asking you to accept this cosmology or the idea of angelic doubles. And I have to leave it to you to work out what it might mean for you that Jesus probably did accept these things (they were part of the world in which he lived). I simply want to highlight that this is indeed a radical reversal. The last will be first. Jesus is saying that children, and whoever else may be implied by the term ‘little ones’ – the people considered too simple to fulfil the law – already see God continuously by virtue of their existential connection to the highest-ranking angels in heaven.
So, here’s my argument so far. My logic follows the classic formula of a syllogism: if a = b, and b = c, then a = c. If the pure in heart see God, and seeing God is the privilege of the ‘little ones’, then the pure in heart must be these same ‘little ones’ – and by extension, those who are able to change and be like them, if any such there be.
Suddenly, the sixth beatitude looks a lot more like the others. The lowly, excluded, and disdained are lifted up.
But this only raises another, even more difficult question: in what sense are the ‘little ones’ pure in heart, and how are we supposed to change and become like them?
To address this question, I’m going to ask you to find the pew sheet inside your Order of Service and turn it over to the back page. Printed here, in three different forms, is the text of Deuteronomy 6.4-5. In addition to a translation into English, I’ve given you the Hebrew and a transliteration into Roman alphabet, which I hope you can follow along as I read it out loud. Please stand for this reading, if you are able. These verses are the closest thing to a creed or a gospel proclamation that there is in Judaism, and during worship Jewish people normally stand to recite them.
She-ma Yis-rah-el Ah-do-nai Eh-lo-hey-nu Ah-do-nai e-chad
Veh-ah-hav-tah ayt-Adonai Eh-lo-hey-kha
beh-khol le-vav-kha,
oo-veh-khol naf-sheh-kha
oo-veh-khol meh-o-deh-kha
Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.
Please be seated.
These verses from Deuteronomy are known universally among the Jewish people as the Shema, after the very first Hebrew word I just uttered. Shema is an imperative verb; it calls Israel to ‘Hear!’, to listen up and reaffirm its community-defining trust in one sovereign deity. If you visit a synagogue today you will hear the Shema beautifully chanted in Hebrew as a core element of daily morning and evening prayers and sabbath services. It has been integral to Jewish public worship and personal piety for centuries. Jewish writings from the first century after the life of Jesus tell us that, by that time, Jewish men considered it an obligation under Jewish law to recite the Shema at least twice a day: upon getting up every morning and before going to bed every night. Because of this evidence, some scholars have suggested that this practice was already normative at the time of Jesus and would have been part of his daily life of prayer. We don’t know for sure, but I like to think that it was. (You know how the gospels sometimes mention that Jesus went off somewhere to pray by himself, and you wonder, so what was he praying? I think the Shema gives us a clue.) In any case, the gospels make it clear that Jesus regarded the commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might, as the greatest commandment of all. And he correlated it with another that he said is like it: the commandment from Leviticus 19.18, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’
You can probably see where I’m going with this. It seems to me that the whole of the Sermon on the Mount can be read as a commentary on the Shema and its corollary. It is Jesus’s account of what it looks like – truly and fully – to obey the commandment to love the Lord your God with ALL your heart, and with ALL your soul, and with ALL your might – with your whole and undivided being, that is to say; or, put more concisely, with a pure heart: with a heart that is like refined salt unmixed with additives; with a heart that does not try to serve two masters; with a heart that seeks first the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, trusting that enough of daily bread will follow; with a heart that enters by the narrow gate. In all these ways, with all these images, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount underscores the singleness of focus, the totality of being, the unity of purpose demanded by the Shema – a unity meant to mirror the unity of God.
From this we can infer why Jesus calls people who are poor in spirit, bereaved, or meek ‘blessed’ – which is to say, happy or fortunate. It is because, unlike the rich and powerful, they have little to divide their hearts from loving God. They have less to give up and find it easier to turn to God wholeheartedly; God is their only recourse. As Sue put it, speaking of those who mourn, they are already ‘hollowed out of everything that does not really matter’, and their hearts are primed to become dwelling places for God.
But at the same time, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount insists that love of God is inseparable from indiscriminate love of others. The undivided heart, it seems, does not divide. Like the sun and the rain, the undivided heart does not show partiality between friend and foe, just and unjust, rich and poor, noble and common, healthy and sick, righteous and sinner, clean and unclean, good and evil, but is open and vulnerable to all.
From this, finally, we can infer in what sense Jesus saw children as pure in heart and in what respect he wants us to emulate them. Jesus saw children as pure in heart, not because they are credulous or capable of blind faith, but because they have not yet been drawn into the economies of status, and learned the structures of dualism, that create conflict and inequity. To change and become like them is likewise to see humanity as one in the image of God – to see God face to face in one another.
Did Jesus idealize children in holding them up this way as blessed examples, living parables of what the kingdom is like? Quite possibly. Does that matter? Probably not. What matters is the parable in the beatitude: the kingdom of heaven happens when we approach others without judgment, when we love one another as Jesus loves us.
But to that I would also add this final thought: the kingdom of heaven happens when the undivided heart does not divide God but instead, in awful silence like Job, learns to see God in all things – in what seems evil as well as in what seems good. It happens when the undivided heart confronts – quite literally comes face to face with and can still love – the one overwhelming God who, as it says in Isaiah 45, formed light and created darkness, who brings prosperity and creates disaster.
‘Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.’
Amen.
