Learning (the benefits of being poor)

Perhaps I've never been poor enough.

In reading Philip Yancey's 'The Jesus I Never Knew,' and the chapter on the Beatitudes... it does seem that the poor have a special place in God's kingdom. Or, as Yancey says, 

"Jesus really believed that a person who is poor in spirit, or mourning, or persecuted, or hungry and thirsty for righteousness has a peculiar 'advantage' over the rest of us. Maybe, just maybe, the desperate person will cry out to God for help. If so, that person is truly blessed."

He also shared this list from Monika Hellwig on the "advantages to being poor":

1. The poor know they are in urgent need of redemption.
2. The poor know not only their dependence on God and on powerful people but also their interdependence with one another.
3. The poor rest their security not on things but on people.
4. The poor have no exaggerated sense of their own importance, and no exaggerated need of privacy.
5. The poor expect little from competition and much from cooperation.
6. The poor can distinguish between necessities and luxeries.
7. The poor can wait, because they have acquired a kind of dogged patience born of acknowledged dependence.
8. The fears of the poor are more realistic and less exaggerated, because they already know that one can survive great suffering and want.
9. When the poor have the Gospel preached to them, it sounds like good news and not like a threat or a scolding.
10. The poor can respond to the call of the Gospel with a certain abandonment and uncomplicated totality because they have so little to lose and are ready for anything.

 

I'm not sure how true all these "advantages" still are, but it's certainly something to think about. If the kingdom of God is truly 'upside down,' as they say... perhaps we would all do well to be a little more poor.