Christian salvation and the Beatitudes #1: Poverty in spirit

I’ve been wrestling with the concept of Christian salvation for decades. I used to think I was a rebel heretic unable to swallow the hard pill of God’s truth. But as time has gone on, I’ve grown more and more convinced that the popular evangelical Christian account of salvation as afterlife insurance is a worldly consumerist perversion of the gospel validated by the same middle-class anxiety that has created the insurance industrial complex. When I read the teachings of Jesus and Paul at face value, I find Christian salvation to be something way more mystical and authentic than afterlife insurance. In particular, I’m fascinated by what Jesus’ Beatitudes seem to say about salvation. So I decided to do a series considering each of them, starting with the first.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 5:3

Do you have to be poor in spirit to enter the kingdom of heaven? I think so. I’m not saying you have to be despondent or depressed. But I don’t think you can have any kind of genuine relationship with God if you’re completely satisfied with yourself. People who are self-satisfied turn every kind of spiritual piety into a means of justifying and worshiping themselves. Their perfectly orthodox doctrine and exhibitionist humility is just a confirmation of their awesomeness. As long as your life is built around showcasing your awesomeness, Jesus can’t do much with you, even if your awesomeness includes parroting all the right answers about Jesus. Your personal awesomeness immunizes you against any infiltration by the Holy Spirit.

Our souls are like the soil of gardens. Unless the ground is broken and tilled, no spiritual seed will ever take root. We must be broken before we can be fertile. We don’t necessarily have to fail to be broken, though failure is the most excellent spiritual medicine. We just need to be acutely aware of our utter inadequacy and dependency on God. Jesus says in John 15:5, “I am the vine and you are the branches… Apart from me, you can do nothing.” If we experience ourselves to be perfectly correct and self-sufficient, then we are not branches on the vine of Jesus. Only insecurity and self-doubt will lead us to seek our nourishment from Jesus’ vine.

I hate living in uncertainty and inadequacy. During the past year and a half of campus ministry, my ego has been completely annihilated multiple times. Psalm 42:3 has been my life-verse during this season: “My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, ‘Where is your God?'” But it’s a strange thing. I don’t think you can really taste God’s presence until your tears really have been your food and you’ve been taunted by the voices that say, “Where is your God?” In the midst of a season when I’m filled with uncertainty about my effectiveness and the legitimacy of my call, I’ve had so many strange and beautifully intimate encounters with God. Though I hate being poor in spirit, I would never want to be without the moments when God has reached through and touched me.

Four years ago, I started fasting every Monday. More recently, I added Fridays. When I started fasting, I thought that the practice was going to make me more disciplined and in control of my mind. But I don’t feel like I’ve made much progress on becoming less of a complete mess than I was four years ago. The one thing fasting has done is to make me weak and desperate for God. On Mondays and Fridays around 3 pm, I am poor in spirit because my blood sugar is low. And that’s when my best spiritual encounters tend to happen.

Paul describes this poverty in spirit in terms of Jesus’ cross in Galatians 2:19-20: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” We have to be crucified if we want Christ to live within us. If this is not an empty ideological statement, that means that we need to experience helplessness and a complete loss of control in order to surrender sufficiently to Christ. It’s completely different to appropriate “Christ” as a rational concept you preach about and pontificate about from a place of self-satisfaction than it is to have your ego crucified so that the living Christ can live within you. Without poverty in spirit, we may say and believe all the right things about Jesus; we may have prayed all the right prayers to cash in on our afterlife insurance; but we remain un-surrendered. Without surrender, there is no salvation.