Blessed are the gentle: They shall have the earth as their inheritance.
—Matthew 5:5
Father Richard explains why the third beatitude would have been simultaneously shocking and comforting to Jesus’s listeners:
The third beatitude is almost taken verbatim from Psalm 37:11: “The humble shall have the land for their own.” Some translate “gentle” as “the nonviolent,” but perhaps the most familiar translation is “the meek.” There’s an irony here. If there was one hated group in the Palestine of Jesus’s day, it was landlords—those who possessed the land. Nobody possessed land except by violence and oppression, by holding onto it and making all the powerless peasants pay a portion of their harvest. The landlords certainly weren’t meek or gentle, so Jesus is turning that around and saying, “No, it’s you, humble ones, who are finally going to possess the land.” [1]
Author Micha Boyett considers how Jesus’s listeners would have understood the paradox of the meek “inheriting the land”:
[Jesus] says that those who have no power and those who choose to give up their power are the ones who inherit the earth, which could also be translated as “the land.” The people sitting before him … are certainly not landowners. They are most likely what we could consider today to be sharecroppers, working the land for a wealthy owner, who didn’t need to get his hands dirty….
“Makarioi [Greek for “happy”] are the powerless ones,” Jesus says. “They shall have the earth as an inheritance.” They will recognize that the earth has always been theirs. He is getting at something essential to the spiritual life: our ownership is temporal. According to the psalmist, human beings are like the leaves of grass, here for a moment and then, poof, gone. We’re all stewards here, and the land remains long after we’ve become the dust we came from. Only the divine one possesses it. In God’s dream for the world, possession is an illusion. When we humble ourselves, when we release our hands from all that we have tried to control and cling to, we discover that those who possess the land are the ones living under the illusion. But the ones who release their power and the ones who never had power to begin with inherit the really real….
This feels like the secret Jesus is letting his listeners in on: the power we’re born into and the power we gain throughout our lives is a mirage. In the really real, power can only be shared…. Meekness—the upside-down possibility that when we let go of the power we hoard, power grows wide enough to share. When the few in power release their hold on the land, everyone has space to spread out and flourish. Meekness is the way toward an earth where we live in peace, where resources are shared, where everyone has enough. [2]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media, 2022), 141.
[2] Micha Boyett, Blessed Are the Rest of Us: How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole (Brazos Press, 2024), 74, 75, 76.
Image Credit and inspiration: Minh Trí, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like a raindrop poised on a leaf, the Beatitudes provide a drop-by-drop prescription to counter-culturally create the kin-dom of God.
Story from Our Community:
One of the most powerful aspects of Jesus’s life was his willingness to fully experience and express human emotion, including grief. Jesus embodied what it means to mourn, not as a sign of weakness, but as an act of love, justice, and divine sorrow for a wounded world…. Jesus allowed himself to fully feel and express grief, loss, and sorrow with Martha and Mary. Jesus’s tears reveal that the Divine One does not rush past mourning but enters into humanity’s pain. This profound moment shows that Jesus did not dismiss suffering with divine detachment. No, he stood in it, felt it, and wept with those who wept.
—Malika C.
