Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
It sounds absurd. Blessed are the 'pushers,' surely, the 'go-getters,' the 'muscle men'; the world is their oyster. The meek are the very last whom we would expect to possess the earth. What does Jesus mean?
Everything turns, of course, on the meaning of the word 'meek': in the Greek praus, in the Hebrew ahnaw. To go back to the Aramaic words Jesus may well have used, the first three beatitudes could all have sounded alike when He spoke them:
The poor are the 'ahnee'; the mourners are the 'ahnah'; the meek are the 'ahnaw' ... the ahnee, the ahnah, the ahnaw!
This sort of fun with words was a feature of the way the Hebrew-speaking peoples used their language; they used words the way we do when we make puns. The language lent itself to that. The prophets of the Old Testament were very good at it; so was Jesus. You could give your statement of truth a pithy flavour, a catchy sound, that made it easy to grasp and remember. Preachers try to do it still; the trouble is you can twist the truth 'out of true' to get the alliteration or the rhyme you want (which makes me wary of it). Jesus did not; He would never have sacrificed truth to a catch-phrase.
The effort to convey in English this delightful element in His teaching (listening to Him was fun!) is the despair of translators. J. B. Philipps tried to do it in a translation he made of four of the prophets from the Old Testament, and he did it rather well. But you cannot always find words to match in English. How would we render the catchy way Jesus said these three beatitudes? "Blessed are the bereft, the bereaved and the be-" what? The "berated" (for the meek)? Not right? The "becalmed" then? Not right either. Then try the "mendicants (for the poor), the mourners and the meek"? But that too is forced and unnatural. You just cannot get it right in English, which is a pity. So this fascinating feature of the Lord's way of teaching hardly ever sees the light of day.
The point however is that by using language the way He did, Jesus meant us to see all three beatitudes as having something in common.
The poor, the 'ahnee', are those who have nothing. They have ceased to look to this world or to anything in it for even the bare necessities of life: they have learned to look to God alone for every little thing.
The mourners, the 'ahnah', are those who have no-one. They have ceased to look to human nature to relieve their inner loneliness; they have learned to look to God alone to comfort them, and give them inner well-being.
Who then are the meek, the 'ahnaw', but those who have recognised that they have nothing in themselves? They have ceased to look within to find fulness and satisfaction. They have ceased from self. They have learned to look to God alone for worth.
The blessedness of which Jesus speaks we all seek. We are all in search of 'life,' of fulness, of 'the good' - call it what you will. We want to be happy, we want to be satisfied, we want to be secure and at ease; in a word, we want to be 'blessed'. Where is that blessedness found? In things? In people? In ourselves? We try them all.
We all have experiences in which we feel deprived or rejected. "Our treasures, whether of things or of people, which had been our pride and joy are taken from us; and we stand beside the grave of them, gazing in on vacancy and emptiness, and we think we can never be happy again." (F. B. Meyer)
If we thought to find our happiness in having money - if we thought, in Jesus' words, that "a man's life consists in the abundance of things which he possesses" - we are in for a rude awakening somewhere down the line. The lure of wealth is a cheat. We learn, as the Beetles learned, that "money can't buy you love."
So we settle our hopes, perhaps, on friendships instead, only to find that people too let us down. They make strange and alarming demands on us; or they back off just when we need them most; and even if they are there in a crisis, and do try to help, they often fail, somehow, to 'deliver the goods.' Or death, it may be, "that most unkindest cut of all," takes them from us.
And the temptation that besets a man who knows that the world is a cheat and human nature cannot be trusted is to turn away from everything and everyone outside himself, and turn inwards, determined to be sufficient unto himself alone. From the world of things and of people he turns to the world of 'inner space,' to the cultivation of his own interior mental and emotional (and even spiritual) life.
The meek are those who have learned that that world, too, is a cheat.
The philosopher Pascal knew this. In his 'Pensées' he wrote, "The philosophers and the preachers of natural religion all say, 'Retire within yourself: it is there you will find your rest.' And that is not true ... it is not true." It is what the gurus tell us to do, though. It is the chief tenet of most Eastern mystical cults and religions. It is what the drug culture, too, tells us to do: 'Let drugs take you down into the undiscovered world within, where unimaginable resources lie waiting to be tapped.' The Rosicrucians peddle that philosophy, and the Theosophists, and a good many brands of humanism, including the New Age movement.
But all we are likely to discover when we search within ourself is what the apostle Paul discovered: "I know that in me, that is in my human self, there dwells no good thing." (Rom. 7:18) The old cliché of the philosopher Descartes, "I think, therefore I am," degenerates, as Jean Paul Sartre once observed, into "I stink, therefore I am"! A telling piece of doggerel which exposes the sheer pretentiousness of the philosophy of looking within yourself to find meaning and worth in life runs:
I, who am I, and no man may deny it -
I, who am I, and none shall say me 'Nay' -
Lo, from the rooftops to the hills I cry it
... I have forgotten what I meant to say!
To search within myself for the blessedness I seek is surely a laughable thing to do, an obvious absurdity, for if I feel the need to search there at all, the self to which I turn is already confessedly empty. Search there, and what shall I find? Waste places ... pits of pain ... cellars where wolves howl. Jesus told us what we shall find there: "From within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness; all these things come from within, and defile the man." (Mark 7:21) If we are honest, we know it; Jesus was right. But we do not like it. So we deny the truth of it, even to ourselves. "That's not me," we say; and we try to prove it to ourselves by the way we behave: we build a record so that we can hide away behind it this uncomfortable 'truth of the inward parts' (Psalm 51:6). We have to believe that we are what our record says we are, and in consequence we become proud and assertive, watchful lest anyone should see behind the mask.
Now the meek are the opposite of all this. They know that their worth does not lie in themselves alone. They know the relief of not having to pretend any more. They have been found out, faced the music ... and found forgiveness, not merit.
They do not have to prove anything to anyone any more. They have learned, and learned well, that our true worth is not what we are worth to ourselves but what we are worth to others - above all to God. They have learned, too, that when we do have worth in another's eyes, it is always their gift to us. When it comes to the matter of our worth to God, that is truest of all.
The man who is meek, in the sense in which the Bible uses the word, is the man who knows that his real worth is measured by what he is worth to God. He knows he has real worth because of the value God has put upon him. He has ceased to be a nobody; but he has become a 'somebody,' not because he is anybody in himself, but because he is a 'God's body'. William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, once said: "What I am worth is what I am worth to God, and that is a marvellous great deal, for He gave His only beloved Son to die for me." The man who knows that knows his real worth. His status is assured. His self-esteem is secure because it is grounded down in the regard God has for him, not in the changing regard others may have for him, nor in the regard he has for himself. If you criticise him and tell him all the things that are wrong with him, he smiles and agrees with you. He knows all that. He does not have to justify himself to you; God has justified him! He does not get uptight; he does not flare up. He is meek. He rests in God, and in God's love for him. He knows it is a miracle that God loves him; but he knows that the miracle is real. His very self-hood depends upon it. His whole life is built on it.
In the Bible, the word 'meek' has a history rather like the history of the word for the poor.
(1) In the first stage of its use, it simply means the down-trodden who cannot defend themselves. Job, for example, complains that ruthless men make life a misery for those who are too poor to defend themselves. (24:2-4) His word for the poor is 'ahnaw,' the meek. So the word meant at first those who were under the domination of others, unable to defend themselves against oppression.
(2) In its second stage of development it came to describe those who bear misfortune quietly without complaining because they know they deserve no better. David was meek in this sense when he allowed Shimei to curse him. David's men wanted to kill Shimei for insulting the king. But David refused to have the man silenced. "If he is cursing me because the Lord has said to him, 'Curse David,' who then shall say, 'Why have you done so?'" (II Sam. 16:10) David achieved that meekness by submitting Himself humbly and uncomplainingly to God.
(3) So the word came to describe the attitude of a man who submits himself quietly and without resistance to whatever treatment God chooses for him. He does not oppose his own opinion of himself to God's opinion of him. Knowing that he deserves no better than to die, he is content with whatever goodness and kindness God in His unmerited grace is pleased to bless him with.
Perhaps no better definition of meekness is to be found in the Old Testament than in Zeph. 3:11-13: their secret is that "they seek refuge in the Name of the Lord." They cast themselves wholly on God's sure mercies, in other words. Their acceptance - and their acceptability - is rooted in God, not in themselves; in God's kindness, not in their own merit. God has justified them: they do not have to justify themselves.
And that secret makes a meek man a strong man. He is no Uriah Heap, wringing his hands and mournfully bewailing his desperate unworthiness. He does not feel demeaned. Because he knows God loves him, steadfastly and truly, he can joyfully affirm himself. That is why Moses, that most powerful and influential leader of men, who simply towers above the great mass of mankind for his sheer strength of character and purpose, could be described in the Bible as meek. Num. 12:3, "Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all men that were on the face of the earth." But he was no whining, self-accusing weakling who was for ever 'putting himself down'; he was a nation maker! What made him the strong but meek man he was was that God had knocked all the self-importance out of him and replaced it with 'God-importance'.
The truest model of all meek men of course was Jesus. But He laid no claim to any goodness of His own! "Why do you call me good?" He asked the rich young ruler; "there is none good, save God only." In other words, Jesus was saying, "Don't attribute the goodness you see in me to me. The goodness you see in me is God's goodness - His alone." Jesus said so again and again. "I do not speak out from myself ... I speak only those things that I hear my Father speak ... I have not spoken on my own authority; the Father Who sent me has Himself given me commandment what to say and what to speak ... What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has bidden me." (John 12:50) "Truly, truly I say to you, the Son can do nothing of His own accord, but only what He sees the Father doing; for whatever He does, that the Son does likewise." (John 5:19)
To hear Jesus, of all men, say such things ought to give us pause. If even the Son of God Himself, in His humanity, claims nothing of Himself, but attributes everything of worth in Him to the Father, then any of us who fancies we have worth in ourselves stand hopelessly condemned. In His human person, even the Son of God had no other goodness than the goodness which His Father daily poured into His heart, and which He received in joyful dependence.
That is why He can say to all who are heavy laden by reason of the guilt of their failure and sin, "Come to Me, and I will give you the rest you seek. Take My yoke upon you" - the yoke of joyfully sharing with Him the gift to you by the Father of your true self so you are filled with His given fulness. That is a yoke to which it is easy to be harnessed. It is a burden that is light - the sort of burden wings are to a bird. In all life's stress and conflict such a man is continually saying, "Father from Thy fulness would I receive, grace upon grace ... grace upon grace." (John 1:16) For grace is all.
Such are the men to whom God can entrust the
earth ... and will: it is they He can trust with it. When you meet a
truly meek man, you meet a man
... so strong, and yet so gentle in his strength
... so free, and yet so dependable in his freedom
... so good, and yet so unassuming in his goodness
... so open, and yet so unassailable in his openness
... so human, and yet so Godlike in his humanity
that you wish with all your heart that you could be like him. The
meek kindle our admiration without any hint of jealousy, because we
know at once that what they have cannot be imitated. All we can hope
is to find their secret for ourself.
And Christ is their secret!
"How blessed are you meek - who have come to Me today to find yourselves. Because you are brothers to me, the Prince of the Realm, I share with you the inheritance my Father gives me."
It is true of them what Paul was to say, "All things are yours - whether the world, or life, or death, or the present or the future - all are yours, and you are Christ's and Christ is God's." (I Cor. 3:22-23)
The 'ahnee', the 'ahnah' and the 'ahnaw': those who have nothing, those who have no-one, those who are nobodies: when they come to Christ for their being and their well-being, they have come to the secret source of every precious thing.
Let us say to God as did the Psalmist, "Thou art my Lord: I have no good apart from Thee." (16:1)
"Come unto me, all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light, and you shall find rest unto your souls." You shall!
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