Blessed are the poor in spirit and rich in assets

The “Beatitudes” — a list of blessings and woes attributed to Jesus — are listed in two of the Gospels of the New Testament.

Well, sort of. The version in Matthew’s Gospel doesn’t include the woes. Matthew’s version is also fuzzier — less concrete and forthright — than the version in Luke.

Here’s Luke’s version:

Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.

Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep.

Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

The language there is clear and precise. When Jesus says “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God,” we know who it is he’s addressing.

Compare that with the version in Matthew, which says: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

For some reason there he’s not speaking directly to these folks (“yours”), but only about them (“theirs”). And who are these people anyway? “You who are poor,” Jesus said in Luke’s Gospel, but here in Matthew he’s talking about those people over there somewhere who are “poor in spirit.”

What is that supposed to mean?

The usual answer is that the “poor in spirit” are those who have more than enough money and material goods, but who also have a really positive attitude.

Or something. In any case, this is why Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes is the preferred version here in America. It lets rich people (like me, for example) pretend that Jesus never said anything woeful about us while also pretending that we’re the intended recipients of the blessings he proclaimed for the poor.

We can use the version in Matthew to cancel out or overrule the version in Luke. Or we can pretend that they’re really saying the same thing — that when Jesus said “you who are poor” in Luke’s Gospel, what he really meant was “poor in spirit,” and that what that meant wasn’t really about wealth and poverty at all, just about our feelings toward our wealth and others’ poverty.

That seems to be how Ann Romney is using this phrase from Matthew’s “Beatitudes for Rich Christians.” On Fox News today, she said:

We can be poor in spirit, and I don’t even consider myself wealthy, which is an interesting thing. It can be hear today and gone tomorrow.

The Romneys took in around $20.9 million last year and they’re worth about $250 million. But Ann Romney is perfectly in keeping with the usual American exegesis of the Matthew-only Beatitudes. It doesn’t matter if you’re multi-millionaire, just so long as you don’t consider yourself wealthy.

It’s all about having the proper positive attitude, right?

(For a more scholarly, less snarky take on the two versions of the Beatitudes, see J.R. Daniel Kirk on “New Testament Scholarship and the Starving Poor.”)