Although the promise of comfort is in the Beatitude expressed in the future tense, its bestow- ment is not to be regarded as exclusively eschato- logical. As the Kingdom was present among men at the time when Jesus spoke these words, so the comfort of the Kingdom was already a present reality and available to all. Not that all mourning was then to cease,—that stage belongs to the future consummation of the Kingdom,—but that Jesus brought a true consolation for all sorrow, in the knowledge that God is a loving Father who does all things well, and that all men, like the Son Himself, are perfected through suffering (He 58 12°11), Rest and peace came to the world in and through Christ (Mt 112-9, Jn 141: 27 1633),
(3) ‘Blessed are the meek : for they shall inherit the earth.’ The idea is that of Ps 374 ‘the meek shall inherit the earth,’ + and the LXX renders on:x by mpae?s. Meekness is an OT ideal, and is closely related to that of the ‘poor,’ which Jesus had already taken up in the first Beatitude. This same Hebrew word is rendered in the English VSS now by the one word, now by the other; also os2y, com- monly translated ‘poor,’ is sometimes translated ‘meek’ (cf. Is 611 in RV text and margin, and see Lk 4!8), In Is 66? the term »3y is associated with mam; and ‘33-by 197, where the three ideas seem closely akin: ‘To this man will I look, to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and that trembleth at my word.’ Cf. also Ps 25°, Pr 16”. The OT conception of meekness seems therefore to concern a man’s attitude towards God rather than towards other men. The opposite of this meekness is pride and arrogance towards God, and such men He will bring to nought, Ps 75*7 9474+. It is primarily His attitude towards God which Jesus has in mind when He says, ‘Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in
* For the former view, Clem, Alex., Chrysostom, Jerome, and recently Achelis ; for the latter view, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and recently Ibbeken. B. Weiss holds that it is impossible to tell whether the one or the other idea is intended or both. Tholuck, Bergrede®, p. 73 (Eng. tr. p. 79), says: ‘The mourning spoken of is the sorrow of penitence immediately flowing from a felt poverty of spirit. . . . This penitential grief is not, how- ever, to be regarded as confined to the period of conversion, but ought to be viewed as a continuous condition of the soul.’
tT Mt 55 paxcpior of zputis, Ors adrol xAnpovoqoovoly THy Yyiy. Luke has no parallel. ;
Bacon, Sermon on the Mount, pp. 116, 127, holds that this Beatitude was not given by Jesus, but ‘is a mere scribal gloss, a marginal addition from Ps 3711, which has crept in after v.? in some manuscripts, after v.4 in others.’ This is a possible, but not a likely, hypothesis.
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heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls’ (Mt 11**), And the ‘meek’ who in the third Beatitude are pronounced blessed are those who live in trust- ful submission to God, seeking to know and to do His will; humility rather than_ self-assumption and pride characterizes them. Compare also the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, Lk 189-14, They become a part of the great world, and are fellow-labourers with God in His great purposes, instead of being ends in themselves and isolated elements in the Divine system. They do not thereby lose their identity and their importance ; instead, by complete self-committal to God, they find the perfect realization of themselves, and achieve a personality of greatest influence in the universe.
A necessary outworking of this meekness to- wards God is a quality of gentleness, forgiveness, and self-abnegation in a man’s relations to his fellow-men. This is the conception which St. Paul seems to have had of the meekness of Jesus, 2 Co 10" (cf. also Eph 4’, Ja 3", 1 P 3*); and it is the meaning which the earlier interpreters found in this Beatitude, since they paid more heed to the classical Greek usage of mpaeis than to the Hebrew conception of 3y. The Greeks had scarcely an idea of that humility of man towards God which formed so true and striking an element in the religion of Israel.
When Jesus promised that the meek ‘shall in- herit the earth,’ He adopted the popular phrase of the Hebrew covenant conception, which was then in use among the more deeply religious as a sym- bolic expression to denote all those good things which were to come with the Messianic kingdom.* The material and ephemeral elements of this hope Jesus passed by; but the spiritual content of it, the inspiring expectation that God would triumph over the world in the persons of His faithful and obedient servants among men, He reaffirmed. Nor did Jesus conceive that this supremacy of the meek on the earth would be solely eschatological and catastrophic ; quite the reverse, for the growth of the Kingdom was to be gradual (Mk 475-82), and the dominance of the world by meekness and humility is progressively realized. Men of such character become increasingly influential and successful; the Divine ideal is making its way among men. Every passing year marks real advance towards the sup- remacy of the people of God.+