To be poor in spirit is to acknowledge our creatureliness and our radical dependency on God, who loves us and wants our happiness.
The Beatitudes all have a similar structure—but upon close review one of them is quite different! Most Beatitudes promise a future blessing to reward a present suffering, except for the first Beatitude in both Matthew’s (Matt 5:3-12) and Luke’s account (Luke 6:20-26):
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 5:3).
The poor presently have the kingdom of God. Their reward is not an upcoming reality or promise. Unlike all the other promises of a future reward, the poor have their reward now; they are not waiting for anything. Luke’s parallel woe likewise highlights the flip-side of the immediacy of this Beatitude’s fruit:
“But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation” (Luke 6:22).
The riches of the rich man—his defining characteristic—seem to be his very punishment. How can riches be their own punishment? Jesus tells us that the punishment is not that riches will be taken away later or that riches will eventually rot, even though we are warned elsewhere that both of these will happen (Jas 5:1-3). He does not tell us to beware of riches because of their transience. Jesus tells us to beware of riches because they deceive us into thinking that we do not need God. “In his riches, man lacks wisdom; he is like the beasts that are destroyed” (Ps 49:21). But why is this the case?
A poor man knows that he must receive everything from others and that he would not survive on his own. His very survival is predicated on dependence. The rich man does everything in his power to provide for himself; he needs no one to help him survive. For the poor, dependency is life; for the rich, dependency is weakness.
Yet it is utter folly to reckon ourselves rich in any way. “Let not the wise boast of his wisdom, nor the strong boast of his strength, nor the rich man boast of his riches” (Jer 9:22). We are all beggars before God, who lovingly created us and continues to hold us in existence. This true knowledge of our littleness before God is humility, the antidote to our false, puffed-up pride.
The danger of riches then is the trap of pride. Riches can delude us into believing something unreal—that we are somehow sufficient on our own. Those who are rich are not automatically condemned; those who are “rich in spirit” have condemned themselves. By making riches “their consolation” they have forfeited the kingdom of heaven. The rich are not condemned for having too much; they have condemned themselves by settling for far too little.
To be poor in spirit is to acknowledge our creatureliness and our radical dependency on God, who loves us and wants our happiness. Let us stand with the poor in spirit, before God with empty hands, ready to receive our reward. This is the kingdom of heaven—and it’s ours for the taking.
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Republished with gracious permission from Dominicana (September 2025).
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