Thoughts on the Beatitudes, Part 8a: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

As a young boy I generally and genuinely enjoyed going to church and Sunday school. Besides being attracted to the weekly Scripture readings, I was also fascinated by some of the illustrations of theological, anthropological, and soteriological issues as the catechistic materials presented them (OK, that’s not exactly how I thought about it at the age of 8, but you get the point). One of my favorites was the milk bottle picture: clear and white to signify being in a “state of grace”; a number of x marks to show someone exhibiting a variety of ongoing sins; fully darkened as a representation of the person deeply engaged in more serious offenses.

Over time, I became quite uncomfortable with the milk bottle image of my soul. Even moments of cursory honesty brought me to confront the undeniable fact that I was at least constantly x-marked, if not rather in danger of being fully darkened. I remember being troubled by two unquenchable reasons for my disquiet. The first was that there were too many pieces of evidence supporting my perception of being morally besmirched. If I didn’t see it myself, I always had my Sicilian mother to remind me of the truth. The second was this very notion of a “state of grace.” What in the world did that mean? Was it even a quantifiable condition?

Whether or not they knew it, those who taught the concept were setting an impossible standard and putting impressionable children in an untenable position. After all, I certainly wanted to have a clean and clear bottle-soul, but I was incapable of not fouling its contents within a very short time of erasing the black marks. And who knew if I even had eliminated all of them? To maintain a spotless interior meant eternal vigilance and a minute-by minute examination of actions, motives, and intent. Faced with such a Sisyphean task, I abandoned my perfectionist phase not long after I began it, initially more than a bit concerned that I was putting my entire existence at risk, but eventually concluding that I was in little to no danger of an immediate demise. Surely I had entered a state of grace – cheap grace.

Several decades later, God has yet to smite me with the rod of his wrath. The intervening years reveal that my ongoing survival is not because of presumptuous cheap grace – the mystery is more that I live in spite of it. Meanwhile, the clean bottle conundrum remains, and becomes ever more insoluble. Every once in a while I think I have a handle on it, only to encounter yet another image of the unstained soul. “I charge you to … keep the commandment unstained and without reproach” (1 Tim. 6:13-14); “Who will ascend the hill of the Lord? He who has clean hands and a pure heart” (Pss. 24:3-4). And Jesus’ own words for this week’s meditation, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”

The pure in heart – the Greek word is katharos, source of our English catharsis – receive the greatest blessing, a vision of the eternal God. This is the one who said of himself that “no one may see me and live,” and Jesus flat out declares, “O yes you can.” Jesus’ disciples resonate with his promise knowing that we HAVE to see the Lord. That’s the only way that we really DO live. But there’s still this issue of purity. Am I sufficiently free of the dark marks that sullied my soul? Is there a percentage of purity that counts, something like the old 99 44/100% Ivory soap, or is the smallest “x” enough to disqualify me?

I don’t think I’m overstating things to say that we have reached the crux of the transcendental existential question here: What must I do (if anything) to be saved? However they ask or frame it, every human being engages the same search for a personal destiny and identity quotient. Both secular and spiritual teachers, including many Christians, believe that the answers mostly consist of various methods of self-discovery, self-empowerment, and self-validation. What they don’t tell you is that taking this kind of responsibility for even one life requires enormous outlays of energy. They also ignore the fact that much of the time we aren’t even aware of the ultimate aspirations that motivate our activities and proximate desires. Then the final and decisive blow to the whole Build-a-Life enterprise comes in Jesus’ own rhetorical question, “What can someone give in exchange for his life?” To paraphrase Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: Any Messianic saying ending with a question mark can be answered with the words no or nothing.

For a follower of Jesus, the reasonable solution would be to trace back the Beatitudes to the initial need for poverty of spirit. But even there the same vexing question lies: Am I ever poor enough? How would I know? Will I have to wait until my passage from this life to eternity to find out? What if I think I’m OK only to hear a verdict of “eternal access denied”? If I live with this uncertainty as a Christian, am I any different from a Muslim or Buddhist or adherent of Sadhguru* or of the hyper-faith evangelists? And my experience as a pastor tells me that the too-easy mental reliance on “once saved, always saved” eventually falls apart for most believers in the face of that ever-damning dirty milk bottle. Unless …

… that reliance rests on the literal crux – the cross of Jesus and what happened on and after it. Where can we resolve the contradictions between our unyielding inability to do enough to be really pure and God’s promise that we will see him as those who are pure in heart? In Christ himself, the one who not only lives the true “state of grace,” but who is grace and truth and purity itself. You and I have no choice than to come in on the coattails of the pure one. When someone asks about our place in God’s presence – “What are YOU doing here?” – we point to Jesus, sidle up to him, and make the simple but incontrovertible claim that “we’re with him.”

And as for that, I am not ashamed to be a coattail believer.

More next week. Meanwhile, let’s give up the false religion of striving and let his purity be ours.

*A very popular Eastern mystical purveyor of incredibly trite observations on spiritual life