Word Study on the Sermon on the Mount: How to See God

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. (Matthew 5:8)

This rather relentless study of the Sermon of Sermons presses on into this doozy of a Beatitude that is sure to separate the monks from the flunkies.

There is a sense in this, the sixth Beatitude, that each rung up the proverbial ladder towards salvation tends to be getting harder to grasp, albeit impossible without the Lord’s help. In the first Beatitude, we learned that the humble (poor in spirit) received the blessings from the Lord. Then comes honesty (those who acknowledge their sinfulness and mourn it). Then meekness, righteousness, charity (mercy), but then comes this test: How is your thinking? Noble qualities upheld in the previous Beatitudes help, but for the next step, the Lord requires of us a clean heart. We must focus on the inner demons of our thoughts – especially those pertaining to lust, anger, bitterness, etc. And trust me, I am the last person that should ever be writing a word about this!

The Blessed Theophylact wrote in his Explanation of the Gospel of St. Matthew, “There are many who are not rapacious and greedy, but are generous in almsgiving,  yet they fornicate and commit other uncleanliness (sic). Christ commands, therefore, that along with the other virtues we should also be pure, that is, chaste and temperate, not only in the body, but in the heart as well. Without holiness, namely, chastity, no one will see the Lord.”

Let us consider chastity. In his seminal Christian Dictionary of 1612, Thomas Wilson defined this word as, “An abstinence and forbearing, not from marriage, but from all strange and roving lusts, about the desire of Sex.” So to be “pure in heart,” we could assume, requires us not to be lustful in our thoughts. We also know that Jesus would later, in this same homily, challenge His disciples not only to forego fornication, but also mental fornication. i.e., fantasizing about members of the opposite gender. “Whosoever looketh upon a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with  her already in his heart.” (Matthew 5:28).

But I sense that Jesus wants His disciples to be chaste from more than sexual lusts but from all temptations as well. “By the pure are here meant those who possess a perfect goodness, conscious to themselves of no evil thoughts, or again those who live in such temperance as is mostly necessary to seeing God,” said St. John Chrysostom. He alluded to Hebrews, “Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see God” (12:14). That wraps in the second part of this axiom, that for us to see, or be able to perceive God without distortion or imagination, but purely, we must have pure eyes. Added St. John, “For as there are many merciful, yet unchaste, to shew that mercy alone is not enough, he adds this concerning purity.” I also sense that God wanted to see His saints too – the ones that us nutty Orthodox put on icons and kiss and cross ourselves in front of… He wants us to acknowledge and to know their testimonies of holiness in a sinful world. And by bearing witness to His saints, we would be offered the opportunity to perceive Him too, once we began to become more like them. God wants us also to see reflections of Him in other people — yes, other ordinary folk, created in His own image.

This brings to mind the Transfiguration: Why were Peter, James & John only brought up on Mount Tabor to see the Lord Transfigured and bathed in the uncreated light? For one, perhaps they were the only ones spiritually mature enough to do it. They were pure – as compared to at least one of the disciples below who still had a massive imperfection in his heart. Their eyes were holy enough to perceive holiness and thus, to see God.

OK — not bad for a flunky, but I better stop here before I go way above my pay level.