Blessed are the Pure in Heart

We begin the New Year by ending our series in the Beatitudes, and the blessing we’re looking at today is one that really caught my imagination earlier in the week when I sat down to think about it.

Jesus said: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Now we’ll get to the question of purity in a minute, but before then there’s a tangent I want us to follow, because it leads us into some really important truth.

Listen to that beatitude again.

Blessed are the pure in heart, says Jesus, for they will see God.

There’s something here so obvious that we’d easily miss it, but it’s so significant that we daren’t miss it. What he’s highlighting is that there’s a profound link between what goes on in our heart, and what goes on with our eyes.

And when I realised that, it was like someone took the cork out of the bottle. All these insights and images came fizzing up from nowhere.

I remembered a scene from the Silence of the Lambs where Dr Hannibal Lecter is helping an FBI agent called Clarice Starling catch a serial killer.

“He covets, Clarice, That is his nature. And how do we begin to covet? Do we seek out things to covet? No, we begin by coveting what we see every day.” – The eyes influencing the heart.

I remembered King David, hanging around listlessly on the roof of his palace when he should have been leading his troops in battle, and catching a glimpse of his neighbour’s wife as she undressed for her evening bath. The seed of an idea took root, and he let it grow. The eyes influencing the heart.

I remember a certain 4 year old I live with, who will remain nameless, who until fairly recently didn’t know how to work the remote control on the telly and was therefore limited to whatever channel we chose for her. And we always chose CBeeBees, for two reasons – 1) it’s educational and 2) there are no commercials.

Now the self-same 4 year old has worked out how to use the remote control, and even though we police things quite carefully, she’s coming under the irresistible influence of the advertising agencies who want to sell her things and seem desperate to get her parents to consolidate all their debts into one manageable monthly repayment. They are getting to her little heart through her little eyes.

And on a more serious note, I remembered a piece I read recently about how both teenage boys and girls are being affected by the ready availability of pornography over the internet. The average age at which boys have their first exposure to online pornography is 11, and there’s growing raft of evidence that teenage boys’ treatment and evaluation of girls is becoming conditioned by what they’ve been watching online.

Girls are affected too, because they’re feeling more pressure than ever to look like these pneumatic models the boys are lusting after, and, worse still, to be as sexually accommodating as them. Another example of the profound connection between the eyes and the heart.

“The eyes” says Jesus “are like a lamp for the body. If your eyes are sound, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are no good, your body will be in darkness”.

What we feed our eyes on, we feed our hearts on. What we behold, develops a hold over us, for good or for ill.

But that isn’t the whole story in the eyes/heart relationship. Because the lines of action aren’t one way. How we are in our hearts also determines what we choose to see; maybe even what we’re able to see.

18 days after the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963, white supremacists planted a bomb in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama, and four children were killed.

Connie Lynch, a member of the local Ku Klux Klan was interviewed after the bombing and she was given a hard time because innocent children had been killed. Her response was staggering. “They weren’t children. Children are little people. Little human beings, and that means white people…. They’re just niggers…. and if there’s four less niggers tonight, then I say “good for whoever planted the bomb”

Contrast that with Mother Teresa, who was once asked how she could minister with such kindness among folk whose bodies were rotting away with illness. “Each one of them is Jesus in disguise” she said.

One woman couldn't even recognise the humanity in another human being. The other was able to see the image of God in even the most deformed human being. The condition of our hearts determines what we’re able to see.

And we can bring that idea much closer to home. We all know that there are folk we find it hard to think badly of because we love them, and others we find it hard to see any good in because we dislike them. And the thing is, those judgments, however strongly felt, may not be sound. Our heart is dictating what we’re able to see and others might see the same people in a very different light.

So instead of a one way street from eye to heart, it’s more like a roundabout. What I take in through my eyes affects my heart, but it's equally true that how my heart is determines how I see things.

So now that we’ve followed our tangent, let’s digress back to the beatitude.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

But what does it mean to be pure in heart?

Is he talking about folk who are naturally guileless and straightforward? Is he talking about the super-holy? The goody-two shoes? The spiritual high-achievers?

Come to think of it, can anyone ever really be pure in heart?

I don’t think there’s even one of us here who would dare to claim that title. We know our pitfalls and our weaknesses only too well.

So whatever this is about, I don’t think it’s an expectation of perfection. Christ knows that’s beyond us.

I’ve thought long and hard about that this week, and what helped was when I picked up that word ‘pure’ and ran with it for a while.

It’s important to remember that anything that we call pure doesn’t start out pure. It has to become pure. Even the platinum in Kate Middleton’s engagement ring had to be dug up and refined several times to get rid of all the dross.

Purification is a process – something that takes time and effort. But what we’re aiming for at the end of it is one thing, whether it’s a metal, or a chemical, or a liquid or whatever. When we get down to that one thing, we can say we’ve reached a state of purity.

So what does it mean to be pure in heart?

I think it means that you’re the kind of person whose heart and eyes are focused on the one thing. On God himself.

You’re still a real person. You get up, wash, have breakfast, go to work, love your family, pay your bills. You don’t walk around in a holy trance! But God’s at the centre of it all. He’s the canvas you paint your life on. The field your sow your life in. The sun at the centre of the universe which is you. He gets the priority he warrants, as God. He gets your time and attention.
Are any of us there yet? No.

Should we be discouraged by that? No.

I’m fond of quoting a verse from the book of Hebrews that’s stayed with me since the first time I heard it. Hebrews 10:14 which says that through his sacrifice Jesus has made perfect forever those who are being made holy. What that tells us is that in eternity, it’s a done deal! Our future with God is certain. But for now, we are being made holy. We’re being purified. And that can be a messy process.

So this is not about never messing up. It’s about keeping going with singleness of mind and purpose, even when you do mess up.

How set are you on God? It’s an important question for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, there are several places in the Scriptures that suggest that how we approach God will determine what we find in him.

Psalm 18 is typical: the Psalmist says

25 To the faithful you show yourself faithful,
to the blameless you show yourself blameless,

26 to the pure you show yourself pure,
but to the crooked you show yourself shrewd.

If we’re lax or lukewarm in our dealings with God, do we expect him to be otherwise with us?

Every now and again, folk say to me that they wish God would make it easier to know him – that he’d come alongside and overwhelm them with some profound experience. And THEN they’d be able to believe.

It happens for some that way. But for most of us, it’s not like that. For most of us, I think God keeps a perfect distance to see just how serious we are about going after him. Any woman who’s ever courted the affections of a man will know the sense in that! It’s called playing hard to get! And it sorts out those who are really interested from the timewasters.

It’s the pure in heart, says Jesus, who will see God. Not the perfect or the faultless, but those who genuinely set their heart and mind on knowing him. They’ll stumble, they’ll fall, they’ll mess up. But they’ll keep going because they’ve come to believe that the answers they’re looking for aren’t to be found in anyone or anything else.

Whether you’re just beginning your pursuit of God, or you’ve been at it for years, today’s beatitude is an encouragement to keep going. It’s a promise that those who seek earnestly will find.

I’ll finish with some words from the book of Proverbs that I love, written a thousand years before our Gospel reading today. I’ve always heard them as a word from God directly to me, and you should hear them that way too.


My child, if you accept my words
and store up my commands within you
turning your ear to wisdom
and applying your heart to understanding
and if you call out for insight
and cry aloud for understanding,
and if you look for it as for silver
and search for it as for hidden treasure,
then you will understand the fear of the LORD
and find the knowledge of God.

It’s all there – everything we’ve been thinking about this morning. Searching, learning, looking, understanding, finding.

Eyes and heart, focused on the one thing, bringing blessing.

Amen