NOTES for Mat 5:1-16
The Sermon on the Mount is truly the preaching of the Kingdom. The "beatitudes" themselves, as the blessings pronounced by Jesus at the very beginning of the sermon are usually called (vv. 3-11), testify that Jesus connects His coming with the manifestation in the world of the fullness of the Kingdom. It is not by chance that He speaks of the blessedness of the "poor in spirit" (v. 3). Here the reference is plainly to those whom the prophetic books of the Old Testament and the Psalter simply call "the poor," although even there the issue is clearly not material poverty.
Poverty in the Gospel sense was first spoken of in the history of God's people by the prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem, who connected the triumph of the poor with the coming of the messianic age (Isa. 29:19). Later, "the poor" came to designate the members of the community of Isaiah's disciples, which then gave rise to a whole movement that remained connected with the prophetic milieu even later. Isaiah considered himself "poor" as well, although he belonged to one of the finest aristocratic families of Jerusalem.
By "poverty" he and his followers understood a spiritual state in which a person relies on no one and nothing in the world except God. With such complete surrender of oneself to the will of God, a person, even if rich and influential, still remained before God a poor person possessing nothing. And in a world that, in the Gospel's words, "lies in evil," such a person most often could not count not only on a kingdom, but even on a quiet life.
And now, according to Jesus' testimony, the day of which Isaiah spoke has finally come: the day of the triumph of the "poor," to whom the Kingdom is given. The reference, of course, is not to an earthly kingdom, but to that messianic Kingdom whose coming Isaiah foresaw and Jesus testified to. Sometimes in the Psalter such people were called "meek" or "humble," and if before they could not even think of inheriting the earth, now, in the world being transformed, such a possibility appears for them (v. 5).
And yet the Kingdom has not yet triumphed to the end and in its fullness. It is not by chance that Jesus speaks of the blessedness of those "expelled for truth" (v. 10; it would be more exact to translate this phrase as "blessed are those persecuted for righteousness") and of the blessedness of those persecuted for His sake and for faithfulness to the Kingdom (v. 11). The Kingdom "has drawn near" (Matt. 4:17), it is already entering the world and transforming it, but it has not yet opened in all its fullness, and the forces of evil resist this opening, falling upon those who live by the Kingdom and bear witness to it. Such is our age, the age of the coming Kingdom.