Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
By the phrase 'the pure in heart' Jesus cannot have meant those who are sinless, for as Solomon said, "there is no man that sinneth not." (I Kings 8:46) If the vision of God is reserved for the sinless, then Jesus wasted His breath, for there is no man living to whom His words could apply. What does it mean?
With each beatitude so far, we have tried to come at its meaning by studying the Old Testament's use of its key word. We shall try and get to grips with this one by starting with the second phrase first, "they shall see God."
That a man sees God tells you something about the man, for we give ourselves away by what we see. We say of people things like, "He has an eye to business, that man" ... or "He has a roving eye" ... or "He has an eye for colour" (if he is an artist). On the days I go sailing, I have more of an eye for the weather than I do on other days. When we are driving, do we have an eye to the little old ladies who are too timid to put a foot on the pedestrian crossing to make the traffic stop, or do we have eyes only for the gaps in the traffic flow where we can swap lanes and nip through? What we have an eye to betrays what we have a mind to. What we see depends not simply on our eyes, but on the mind behind them.
Some folk are always alert to criticism or rejection: they 'see' hostility or disapproval in other people's faces, or in things said to them, where none was intended. A suspicious nature distorts their vision. On the other hand, one of the most uplifting experiences in life is to enjoy the friendship of someone who 'sees' you truly, who sees the good intention in the things you say where others misconstrue them because you have expressed yourself badly.
Little children and young people, especially, are sometimes in great need of someone to see them like that: someone who can recognise the hurt or the fear behind their outward defiance, and who will go to them with swift sympathy instead of curt rebuke. When we see somebody do that, it 'opens our eyes': and not just to what we had failed to see in the child, but to what was in that person, too. We feel condemned. They saw something to which we were blind: something was lacking in us that was not lacking in them. If we are to see as they see, it is not a new pair of glasses we need, but a mind like theirs.
Now this holds good in the spiritual realm too. If I look out on the world and fail to see any trace of God there, it is much more likely to be I who am blind than God Who is missing. It is my seeing eyes - or rather, my unseeing eyes - that are at fault; the mind and heart behind my eyes are filmed over.
Jesus is saying in this beatitude, "You fail to see God because you don't have eyes for Him as you have eyes for other things. It isn't Him you're taken up with. Your heart isn't 'pure,' so you don't see."
It begins to look as though to be pure in heart means to have a 'single eye' for God.
The word 'pure' which Jesus used in this beatitude occurs quite often in the Bible: 'katharos' in the Greek, 'tahor' in the Hebrew. It crops up a lot in the book of Exodus, where it describes the quality of the gold used to make various items for use in the Tabernacle. It had to be 'pure' gold. The Psalmist describes the promises of God as pure, "silver refined in a furnace, purified seven times." (Psalm 12:6) That is to say, there is no trace of deceit or insincerity in them. When God makes promises, He keeps them; He means what he says. The intention behind His promises is genuine; they are 'pure gold.' In the same vein, Psalm 19:9 affirms that "the fear of the Lord is clean" (the same word); and the next phrase, "enduring for ever," explains what the word means: like top quality goods, they are durable. When in Psalm 51:10 David asks God for 'a clean heart,' he amplifies his prayer by the next phrase, 'a new and right spirit within me.' The word 'right' there means 'established, settled.'
The word 'pure' then describes the heart that is true. It describes the sort of man you can depend on because there is no deceit in him. He does not say one thing and mean another; he is transparently sincere. Proverbs 22:11 says, "He who loves purity of heart, and whose speech is gracious will have the king as his friend," because he can be trusted - unlike one of Mrs Ghandi's personal bodyguards who is alleged to have fired the first shot in her assassination. He is "a man of the King's Presence" (II Kings 25:19) who enjoys the privilege of standing in the king's chamber at all times to behold his face and hear his wisdom. The king's business is all his concern and the king's person all his delight.
That gives us a clue to the meaning of the beatitude. The pure in heart who see God are like the men of the King's Presence: they behold His face because His business is all their concern, and His Person all their delight. For them, God is No. 1.
The purity of heart Jesus had in mind was not a state of sinlessness therefore. Rather it describes the man who has a 'single eye' to God. Such a man does not have to be sinless. Indeed, that man precisely is 'pure in heart' who knows only too well how the sin that is in him answers to the evil outside of him, and who therefore knows better than most how great is his need to keep his face turned toward God - "to behold the face of the Lord and to enquire in His Temple."
The man who is pure in heart has a one-tracked mind. He is the very opposite of the kind of man James talks about: "a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. That man must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord." (James 1:8) He will not 'see God.'
The pure in heart are those described in Heb. 12:1-2 as having "stripped off every encumbrance, and especially those sins that wrap around our feet and trip us up, and, with all the single-mindedness of a trained athlete, run the race that is set before them, their eyes fixed on Jesus to inspire and perfect their faith ... who, for the joy ahead of Him, was not side-tracked by anything, but drove a straight course, even through the Cross, to God."
One thing is for sure: if ever we are to attain to such purity of heart, it will have to be awakened, inspired in us; for we are not likely to come at it under our own steam.
To His disciples Jesus said, "Now you are made clean (pure) through the Word which I have spoken to you." (John 15:3)
How very interesting it is that after Matthew finished his account of the Sermon on the Mount, the very first work of Jesus he chose to narrate was this: "When He came down from the mountain, great crowds followed Him; and there came to Him a leper, who knelt in front of Him and said, 'Lord, if you will, You can make me clean.' And Jesus stretched out His hand and said, 'I will; be clean.' And immediately, his leprosy was cleansed." It is His touch upon our lives and His word spoken to our condition that we need if our hearts are to be made pure. To Him we must come. It must be He Who 'occupies us;' we must have eyes for Him, be all taken up with Him. That will happen as we come to Him knowing our need, and looking to Him to meet it as no other can.
As we have noted already, the beatitudes do not become true for us until we stand face to face with Jesus Who spoke them, and hear them said to us again by Him. We are to come to Him, confessing our need and seeking His touch.
It is not a painless process, this purifying of our hearts until we desire one thing. When the Bible speaks of God as a purifier, it speaks of Him as "a refiner of silver." Silver is refined in a furnace! Everything has to be churned up, set bubbling and boiling, till a load of muck and dirt you never realised was there comes to the surface to be skimmed off. It is the only way it can be got rid of. So we have to be shown what there is in us that God finds defiling so that He can skim it off.
We may have to learn that the real sins that blind us to the vision of God are not the sins that concern us most because they disturb our self-respect, perhaps, but something else altogether which we never suspected was there in us.
"We are distressed about some special fault, and ask His aid to overcome it; whereupon He tells us that our real trouble is our self-complacency, and if it His help we seek, He will rouse us from this. But we do not want that at all. Our chief reason for wanting to be rid of that besetting sin was precisely that it disturbed our self-complacency which we hope, after the miracle, to settle back and enjoy once more." (W. Temple, 'Readings in St John's Gospel' [MacMillan] p. 288)
"No, Father, no!" we say. "I didn't mean You to upset and unsettle me like this. I only wanted You to improve my eyes a little with a painless operation under anæsthetic."
But it won't do. It is not our eyes that are at fault, but the mind and heart behind them. It is our hearts that have to be made pure, not our eyes. For it is not only what we see that interests God; it is what He sees.
"Your eye is the lamp of your whole personality," Jesus said. "When your eye is sound, your whole being is full of light. But when it is not sound, the whole of your inner being is full of darkness." It is the man behind the eyes that matters.
What the refiner of silver is watching for when he works over the crucible is that moment - a magic moment - when the surface of the molten metal suddenly clears, indicating that all is pure beneath, and the craftsman sees his own image appear as in a mirror, clear, unblemished and true. That is what God is after. When our hearts are at last made pure, not only shall we see God truly, God too will see His own image faithfully reflected back to Him from us, and He too will be satisfied.
Let us lift up our disordered and divided hearts to Him and say with the psalmist: "Father, turn away my eyes from beholding vanities, and give me life in Thy ways. Unite my heart (!) to fear Thy Name. In righteousness I shall behold Thy face; I shall be satisfied when I awake in Thy likeness." (Psalm 86:11) In other words, "I can't pull myself together; You pull me together."
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