Reverend Marco Ste-Marie

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” Matthew 5:8

When we hear these words, our first instinct may be to wonder what Jesus expects from us.

• How pure must I become?
• How good must I be?
• What must I remove from my life?
• What must I fix before I can see God?

But perhaps before we make this Beatitude about ourselves, we should ask another question:

What does it tell us about God?

Because Jesus is not simply describing human character. Jesus is revealing something about the Sacred Heart toward which our lives are being drawn.

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

What kind of God will they see?

I believe they will see a God whose own heart is undivided.

• A God whose love does not say one thing and secretly intend another.
• A God without hidden agendas.
• A God who does not manipulate.
• A God who does not pretend to love while quietly keeping score.
• A God who does not offer grace with one hand and humiliation with the other.

God’s purity is the purity of undivided love.

And that is important, because Christianity has sometimes spoken about the purity of God in ways that have made God seem almost afraid of humanity.

We have sometimes imagined holiness as separation.

God is pure, therefore God must stay away from everything impure.

And then religion began deciding who was impure.

• Certain bodies.
• Certain relationships.
• Certain people.
• Certain identities.
• Certain lives.

People were told that they were somehow too stained, too complicated, too different, too broken to come near the Holy.

We do not purify ourselves so that God will finally tolerate us.

We consent to the transforming love of the God who has already drawn near.

The central claim is not, “Morally flawless people earn a vision of God.” It is closer to this:

Those who live without duplicity—whose love, motives, relationships, and actions are being brought into alignment with God’s merciful way—are already living within God’s blessing, and they are promised a transforming encounter with God.

They are blessed because they will see God.

This should not be turned into a crude cause-and-effect formula, as though sufficient moral achievement forces God to appear.

It is a theological correspondence: hearts increasingly opened to truth and love become capable of recognizing and receiving the God whose character is truth and love.

But then Jesus appears. And Jesus does something remarkable.

• He moves toward people.
• He touches those others will not touch.
• He eats with those respectable religion avoids.
• He welcomes those pushed to the edges.
• He speaks with people whose lives are complicated.
• He stands beside the shamed.
• He restores people to community.

If Jesus shows us the character of God, then divine purity cannot mean divine disgust.

God’s holiness is not fragile. God does not become contaminated by loving us.

God’s purity is love so complete that it can enter the most wounded places of human life without becoming cruel, frightened, or defensive.

Perhaps that is what makes God pure. God is entirely what God claims to be.

• Love.
• Mercy.
• Compassion.
• Justice.
• Faithfulness.

There is no gap between the love God proclaims and the love God embodies.

And when Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart,” perhaps he is inviting us into that same wholeness. Not because God demands that we become perfect.

But because the closer we draw to the heart of God, the less comfortable we become with living divided lives.

• We begin noticing the spaces between what we say and what we do.
• We pray for peace, and yet sometimes nurture resentment.
• We proclaim welcome, and yet discover limits to whom we really want beside us.
• We speak passionately about compassion, and then encounter someone whose behaviour makes compassion difficult.
• We believe in forgiveness, until there is actually someone to forgive.
• We speak about justice, until justice asks something of us.

God does not expose these contradictions in order to shame us. God brings them into the light because love desires wholeness.

That is another thing this Beatitude tells us about God: God sees beneath appearances.

Human beings are easily impressed by presentation.

We notice status.

Reputation.

Success.

Religious language.

Respectability.

God sees deeper.

God sees the fear beneath the anger.

The wound beneath the defensiveness.

The insecurity beneath the need to control.

The longing beneath the failure.

The goodness others have overlooked.

And yes, God also sees the places where we deceive ourselves.

But God does not see those things in order to condemn us.

God sees because God desires to heal what is divided.

Grace brings hidden things into the light, not to humiliate us, but to make us whole.

And perhaps this helps us understand the promise:

“They will see God.”

Maybe seeing God is not simply about one day receiving a heavenly vision. Perhaps seeing God begins when we start seeing as God sees.

• Fear can make another person look like a threat.
• Greed can make creation look like a commodity.
• Privilege can make suffering disappear.
• Resentment can reduce someone to the worst thing they have ever done.

Purity of heart can be reduced to private devotional feelings while exploitation remains unchallenged.

An inward spirituality that never affects relationships, structures, money, power, or solidarity is not the integrated heart Matthew describes.

But the heart of God sees differently.

God sees a person.

God sees dignity.

God sees suffering.

God sees possibility.

God sees what can still be healed.

God sees what can still be reconciled.

Therefore:

A pure heart is not one protected from the suffering of others. It is one able to see suffering truthfully and respond without self-interest, prejudice, or indifference.

Compassion purifies perception because it teaches us to see a person rather than a category.

Purity without compassion becomes moral vanity.

This means the pure in heart do not escape the world. They become visible participants in God’s healing of the world. Their integrity may even bring them into conflict with systems built upon dishonesty, exploitation, scapegoating, and domination.

And the more our hearts are drawn into the heart of God, the more our vision changes.

Notice where Jesus places this Beatitude.

Immediately before it:

“Blessed are the merciful.”

Immediately after it:

“Blessed are the peacemakers.”

Mercy.

Purity of heart.

Peacemaking.

That tells us something profound about God.

The pure heart of God is merciful.

The pure heart of God makes peace.

The pure heart of God moves toward reconciliation.

The pure heart of God does not demand victory over enemies but works toward the healing of relationships.

And this peace is not pretending everything is fine.

God’s peace is not silence in the presence of injustice.

Jesus confronted exploitation.

He challenged hypocrisy.

He stood with those who were burdened by religious and social systems.

“Pure in heart” does not merely mean “having nice feelings.” It means that the centre from which one thinks, chooses, loves, speaks, and acts is being cleansed of deception and divided loyalty.

Pope Francis describes the biblical heart as the person’s interior centre and interprets purity as an increasingly unified life, freed from deceit and opened to the Spirit.

The purity of God is not passive niceness.

It is love without deceit.

Mercy without indifference.

Justice without hatred.

Truth without cruelty.

Perhaps that is the God Jesus wants us to see.

Not a God waiting for us to become pure enough to approach. But a God whose pure, undivided love is already approaching us.

A God who says:

You do not have to hide.

You do not have to pretend.

You do not have to protect an image.

Let love bring the divided pieces together.

Let mercy soften what has become hard.

Let truth uncover what needs healing.

Let grace teach you another way of seeing.

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

The invitation is:

• To trust that God desires to be known;
• To tell the truth about ourselves without hiding or despairing;
• To hope for the day when all barriers to communion will be healed.

It is not an invitation to become respectable.

It is an invitation to become real, whole, loving, and attentive.

And perhaps the great mystery is this:

The more clearly we see the heart of God, the more clearly we begin to see one another.

And the more compassionately we see one another, the more we discover that God has been among us all along.

Amen.