What churches have not made clear is that the primary human relation to love does not consist in giving but in receiving. In fact the New Testament is wholly preoccupied with God’s loving the world that people may receive. Beatitude is to receive the fullness of life.
What Jesus’s beatitudes do is to make clear the indispensable condition for receiving. We cannot receive unless we lack, unless we are in need. The need does not have to be excruciating, though it may be. But if we are to know the kind of love emphasized in the New Testament, the love that constantly gives nourishment and strength and order for a true life, we can only receive that gifted nourishment to the extent that we need it. Otherwise the gift will not touch us deeply, and receiving the gift will not arouse in us much gratitude or much life.
What Jesus’s beatitudes say is simply this: Blessed are those who receive into the depths and center of themselves. And only those can receive into the depths and center of themselves who are impoverished there, or who are sorrowful there, or who are hungry there, or who are persecuted there.
In other words, if you are not willing to be one with your neediness, you cannot be blessed.
Now this opens a very deep problem in human nature: the problem of concealing and hiding our own suffering and neediness from ourselves. That is a fundamental human capacity, but it is fatal for those relationships and for that creativity which nourish need. In other words, it is fatal for the love that involves the communication of energy or strength or nourishment into need.
Let me give you an example. The poor of Brazil exist in a condition of such poverty and so much sickness that life for them should be an intolerable nightmare. As you may know, great efforts are are being made, not very successfully, to teach them literacy and to arouse them into revolutionary cadres.
What is so extraordinary among these people is the way in which they do not address their suffering. According to many accounts, what they do is to see their suffering as one of the given necessities in the nature of things. But for them that means that their suffering belongs to the cosmos. That is the character of external reality. It stands for them like a vast Himalayan immensity which tends to swallow them up.
As you can realize such a way of construing their situation means that their suffering does not really belong to their level of reality. There is suffering in them, but that which produces their suffering has, as it were, the fixed immensity of God. Not only does this make it absurd for them to do anything about their incredible suffering. This interpretation also has the effect of taking their suffering out of their own hands. They are not responsible for it. They themselves, as persons, have no creative role in relation to it. In exactly this way they deaden some of the outrage, some of the exasperation, some of the degradation involved in their suffering.
Let me turn from this realm of the world to our own lives for another example. American middle-class youth are taught to look for themselves, ahead of themselves, away from themselves. They are taught to locate their real being in what they will become, and they learn to lose themselves in this or that “interest,” in this or that ambition, in this or that distraction. In fact, for many college students, if you deprive them of “interests” and diversions and at the same time if for a moment they stop projecting themselves into the future, they become very distressed.
How are these people trained to live in this way? How can people live out of touch with their specific present? I have come to the conclusion that there does not operate here simply the positive attraction of the future, or of this or that object of interest. There is also working in them a negative feeling of dislike for what they are now. It is not only that they want to be preoccupied with astronomy or to become a pianist. They also have come to feel dissatisfied or reproachful about themselves now. In other words, they carry in themselves a profound sense of their own present inadequacy. They are instilled with shame.
In one of its characteristics, shame involves the wish to hide an inadequacy which we may find in ourselves. For many middle-class young people in the United States, however, this shame applies, not to some specific act which they did, but to their sense of themselves. Unfortunately, when they get a job, when they reach the point for which they are now striving, this self-dissatisfaction does not go away. It is too deeply embedded. When they secure a position, they keep on climbing up the ladder, working always ahead of themselves, in the flight and shame over themselves. And for the rest of their lives, whenever the flight into interests or the future has to stop, they feel undone.
We cannot compare this suffering involved here with the agony of the South American poor. But here too we find operating a peculiar insensitivity to one’s own suffering. For by living into an interest or into the future, these young people can keep their consciousness directed away from their unpleasing selves, and therefore they do not address, in fact, are hardly aware of the subtle suffering which they carry. This fear of failing may provide them with a sly reminder.
When Jesus relates a need and suffering to love, when he calls people into the life of love, this call is not a call for people to give love. It is also a call for people to receive love in connection with their suffering. Just at this point the power of the mind to hide our suffering from us comes into play. Because the mind is the greatest narcotic, it is extremely difficult for any of us to know our suffering, especially the deep suffering that belongs to our daily life. Therefore, to know our own suffering, much less to discover the meaning of love in connection with that suffering, involves a work and a constant learning the whole rest of our lives.
1 The manuscript gives neither place nor date. Lucy McGill has sought to fill in probable dates, noting, “Dates which are not on the manuscripts have been supplied as approximate time of the delivery of the sermons by L. O. McGill.” The suggested time of “Beatitudes” is 1975–1976. No scriptural text is included, but the sermon clearly depends on Matthew 5. The first twelve verses are included here.
Sermon 3: Possessions
Sermon delivered at the Congregational Church
Plainfield, New Jersey
January 16, 1966
For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart.”
Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
For consider your call, brethren; not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption; therefore, as it is written, “Let him who boasts, boast of the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 1:18–31)
For us in the United States, with our high standard of living, possessions absorb a good deal of our attention. We are always buying them, using them, servicing them, replacing them and improving them. But this is no peculiarly American preoccupation. Not only the New Testament, but Jesus himself speaks repeatedly of wealth and poverty, and a good deal of the morality which our Lord teaches refers to this question of possessions.
I
Let us begin with our own experience. What are possessions to us? We must say two things: they are a great burden but a greater blessing. We can