The sixth of Jesus’ “This is good news for…” statements is perhaps difficult to understand at first glance, for a couple of reasons.
Two problems
Firstly, “pure” is a challenging word. Can any of us really claim to be pure? Does that mean our hearts are to be free of any sin or anything else that is unacceptable in God’s sight? Surely we have all failed to do that many times over and continue to do so every day?
What did Jesus mean by “pure in heart”? We’ll look at that in a moment.
Secondly, what Jesus meant by the word “heart” is likely to be very different from the way we use the same word. In 21st century Western culture, we often use the “heart” as a metaphor for our emotions or instincts or gut feelings, as distinct from the way we might use “the head” as a metaphor for knowledge and logical or rational thinking.
For example, in a situation in which you don’t have enough information to know for sure what is the right answer or the right path to take, many people would advise you to “follow your heart”, i.e. to trust your instincts or your feelings to guide you through an uncertain moment.
That is not how Jesus would have used the word “heart”. In the culture in which he lived and taught, the “heart” was seen as a metaphor for “the whole of our inner state, thought and will as well as emotions” (Leon Morris, Pillar NT Commentary). The “heart” was not seen as separate and distinct from the “head”; it represented a person’s entire self. Morris suggests that “This beatitude thus leads us to purity at the very center of our being” and “to be pure in heart is to be pure throughout“.
Now while that might help us understand a little better what Jesus was talking about, doesn’t it only make our first problem above even more challenging to answer? How can any of us possibly hope to be pure in our entire self, in all of our thoughts and emotions?
Can you honestly say you’ve ever gone a single day without any inappropriate or selfish or vengeful or prideful thoughts or feelings? I don’t think I can.
And yet Jesus evidently believed that such people (besides himself) existed, or he wouldn’t have included this statement in his teaching.
So how are we to understand it?
Psalm 24:3-4 shows that this idea was not new to Jesus’ hearers:
Who may ascend the mountain of the LORD?
Who may stand in his holy place?
The one who has clean hands and a pure heart,
who does not trust in an idol
or swear by a false god.
These verses suggests that one of the primary indicators of being “pure in heart” is not trusting in idols or false gods or anything else that might take our loyalty away from the true God.
Craig Blomberg in the New American Commentary suggests:
The “pure in heart” exhibit a single-minded devotion to God that stems from the internal cleansing created by following Jesus.”
R. T. France in the Tyndale NT Commentary puts it like this:
Pure in heart should not be restricted to moral, still less sexual, purity; it denotes one who loves God with all his heart…with an undivided loyalty, and whose inward nature corresponds with his outward profession.
And Michael J Wilkins in the NIV Application Commentary:
In this beatitude Jesus continues an important Old Testament theme in which a pure heart describes a person whose single-minded loyalty to God affects every area of life.
It seems, therefore, that Jesus was not asking for nor expecting to see moral perfection in his followers’ thoughts and feelings. He was expecting each of them to come to him in order to have their hearts and consciences cleansed, and to then live a life of faithful loyalty to God. Again, that does not mean living sinlessly, it means ensuring that nothing else in your life assumes the position that belongs to God.
Tim Keller, an American pastor and preacher, put it this way: idolatry means turning a good thing into an ultimate thing. There may be many things in your life which are useful or bring you happiness, and in which there is nothing inherently wrong or sinful. For example, your family, your job, your health or your social life are all good things which you would be much worse off without. There’s nothing wrong with having these things – the problem arises when these things change from “a good thing” into “an ultimate thing”.
What does that mean? It means that they become the centre of your life, the reason why you do what you do, the one thing you would sacrifice everything else for, the one thing you rely on to provide meaning and happiness in your life. None of these things can sustain that burden. All of them will, at some point, let you down or demand more than you can give.
Only God can truly take the position of “ultimate thing” in your life. To be pure in heart means that you remember this and always keep these other things, as good and right as they are, as secondary to him.
Internal vs external
There was probably one more reason why Jesus made this statement the way he did. Some of the religious leaders of the culture in which he lived, in particular many of the Pharisees, placed a lot of emphasis on maintaining ritual and ceremonial purity based on the commandments God had given in the Old Testament.
There was nothing per se in wishing to follow these commands, however for many of the Pharisees this caused them to lose sight of what was really important. Jesus called them out for focussing excessively, if not exclusively, on the external appearance of purity based on ritual observance, while neglecting what really mattered: the inner purity of the heart. He accused them of caring more about their reputation as spiritual superheroes in the eyes of the common people rather than genuine loyalty to God.
Wilkins in the NIV Application Commentary describes it thus: The pure in heart are those who have not necessarily attended to all of the ritual purification ceremonies of the Pharisees but who nonetheless have given undivided loyalty to God and his ways.
As Paul would later go on to explain in his letter to the churches of Galatia (Gal 3:24-25), the ritual purity laws of the Old Testament were really just a vehicle to help the people arrive at the truth that really mattered: internal purity, which can only be obtained by coming to God in repentance, trusting that he is the only God and the ultimate thing in your life, and asking to be made clean from the inside out.
Next time we’ll look in more detail at what this means in your everyday life, and consider what Jesus meant when he said the pure in heart would “see God”.
Until then, God bless.
Nihilist to Christian 