“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The first Beatitude addresses the poor in spirit — those who know their own spiritual bankruptcy, who have no inner resources to present to God as evidence of their fitness for his kingdom. The corresponding Isaiah passage is 61:1, where the servant is anointed to bring good news to the poor. Luke's version reads simply the poor (Luke 6:20); Matthew's the poor in spirit interprets the material poverty as a spiritual posture — the awareness of need that is the precondition of receiving. Theirs is the kingdom — present tense, not future: the kingdom belongs to these people now. The first and eighth Beatitudes both end with present-tense kingdom language (verse 10), framing the whole as a present reality.
Church Fathers on Matthew 5:3
Every man in his own trade or profession rejoices when he sees an opportunity of exercising it; the carpenter if he sees a goodly tree desires to have it to cut down to employ his skill on, and the Priest when he sees a full Church, his heart rejoices, he is glad of the occasion to teach. So the Lord seeing a great con greg ation of people was stirred to teach them.
Or He may be thought to have sought to shun the thickest crowd, and to have ascended the mountain that He might speak to His disciples alone.
By not choosing His seat in the city, and the market place, but on a mountain in a desert, He has taught us to do nothing with ostentation, and to depart from crowds, above all when we are to be employed in philosophy, or in speaking of serious things.