Blessed Are the Pure in Heart (“Deep Wisdom” 7 of 9)

White Dove by Colin Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I … consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him …

… Forgetting what lies behind [and] straining forward to what lies ahead, I continue my pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling, in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 3:8-9, 13-14

God is all-good. He is Goodness itself. Those who pursue Him alone lose nothing and gain everything. Though they feel the lack of various things of this world, they are more than compensated for them, even in this life. They know that they will find everything that they long for most deeply in Him, and so they strive to follow Him with single hearts.

Because of the perfect goodness of God, containing all other goods within, Christians can and must pursue Him, His Commandments, and His Call in their lives as “the one thing necessary” (Luke 10:41-42).

But sinful creatures that we are, our hearts are prone to stray from their Divine Love. We are more easily drawn to the limited goods that appeal to our senses and our earthly life, than towards the Highest Good which appeals to our deepest spiritual needs. In a word, our hearts are impure.

Going hand-in-hand with impurity, is hypocrisy. We need to have our hearts set completely on the Kingdom, and not partially on the Kingdom and partially on worldly things. Nothing impure can enter heaven. But since we are not perfect yet, the only option for us, to find salvation, is to pursue it; to pursue purity of heart.

Those who wish to have pure hearts, then, embrace repentance and self-denial to correct and re-correct their wayward hearts. They strive to conform themselves to “faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6), and to purge anything that falls short of it. In other words, they pursue single-minded devotion to God, continual conversion, and a growing hatred of sin. They seek to be perfect as their heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48). They want to love God with their whole hearts, minds, souls, and strength (Mark 12:30). They follow Jesus closely in a living relationship.

Doing this would not be possible without the hope that comes from knowing Christ. We know that God is so good to us, and so forgiving. And that He gives us power (John 1:12). Power that He provides through the love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit He has given us (Romans 5:5). Power to overcome obstacles to holiness — to tread upon serpents and scorpions and all the power of the enemy (Luke 10:19) — and to gradually attain perfection.

St. Paul shows this mature Christian attitude when he says,

I … consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him … to know him and the power of his resurrection and [the] sharing of his sufferings by being conformed to his death … It is not that I have already taken hold of it or have already attained perfect maturity, but I continue my pursuit in hope that I may possess it, since I have indeed been taken possession of by Christ. … [But] forgetting what lies behind [and] straining forward to what lies ahead, I continue my pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling, in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 3:8-14

This hopeful way of living not only leads us towards greater purity of heart, but it makes us, in a way, pure even now. The apostle John says, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope based on him makes himself pure, as he is pure” (1 John 3.2-3).

In other words, when we are in heaven, we shall see God. And by having hope for this, we are made pure. It’s kind of the complementary-reverse of the beatitude. The beatitude is “Blessed are the Pure of Heart; for they shall see God.” This saying is, “Hope to see God; by this hope, you are made pure.”

How does the “deep wisdom” of the pure of heart prepare us to evangelize?

We are so very powerless without Him. By pursuing purity of heart, valuing the Lord above all created things, persevering in hope to see His Face, and rejecting all that gets in the way of that, we will be as close to Him as is possible for us now; and we will grow closer.

And the closer to Him that we are, the more the power of His love will manifest itself in us for the salvation of others. We will be true images of God, children of the Father. For this reason, we will be more fruitful as evangelists.