"Blessed Are the Spit Upon"
- Dr. Todd R. Wright
- Nov 1
- 4 min read
Luke indicates that Jesus grew up poor. When he was presented at the Temple, the offering his parents gave – two young pigeons – was what people gave if they couldn’t afford a lamb.
Luke 6:20-31
November 2, 2025
Dr. Todd R. Wright
“Blessed are you who are poor…” – that’s how Jesus starts.
Well, actually, to begin, he spent a night on a mountaintop praying. When dawn came, he chose twelve people from among the disciples who had been following him, and named them apostles – sent ones, messengers. When he came down to a level place, a great crowd had gathered from all over the region, as well as the big city of Jerusalem. People had even come from Tyre and Sidon, gentile cities, 100 miles away on the coast. They had all come to hear him and be healed.
And the first thing he says to them is “Blessed are the poor!”
At first it seems like a strange thing to say… until you realize who is saying it.
Luke indicates that Jesus grew up poor. When he was presented at the Temple, the offering his parents gave – two young pigeons – was what people gave if they couldn’t afford a lamb.[i]
As a result, I think Jesus sees the poor differently than most people do, then or now.
They are not simply the 40 million Americans who will go hungry without SNAP benefits.
Or the people who flock to Pay it Forward or ring the doorbell looking for help.
Nor are they, as some judge them, a drain on the economy, or lazy, or stupid.
They are children of God who are struggling … and Jesus’ heart goes out to them!
The Greek word for poor people is “ptochoi” – P – T – O – CH – OI. It is not some kind of specialized word to describe a rare subset of folks; it doesn’t seek to communicate a theological nuance; it’s not an ancient relic. It just means poor people.
“Ptochoi,” writes one scholar, “like every word we speak, is part of a web of sound and association, of meaning and hinting.”[ii] A fair number of words that begin with Pt have something to do with wings or flight – like pterodactyl – but that seems like a stretch when describing poor people.
Unless you think of poor people “as that scurrying flock of beggars that swirls (pigeon-like) around public squares hoping to pick up stray crumbs.”
Unless you think of poor people as flighty, hopping from one minimum wage job to the next.
Unless you think of the poor like birds on a wire, or performers on a tight rope, people who threaten to remind us that we are all one serious accident or illness away from falling … into living on a friend’s couch, or in your car, or on the streets.
Jesus does not seem to think of the poor like birds. Instead, he says they are blessed. He says the hungry, the weeping, the exiled, and the smeared are also blessed. His words lift their eyes and raise their spirits. He says in the upside-down kingdom of God, they will not always flail around in the dust, or wait in lines, or sing laments. Things will not always stay the way they are.
Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, inspired by Jesus’ words, wrote in 1946…
“What we would like to do is change the world — make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe and shelter themselves as God intended them to do.
And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute — the rights of the ‘worthy’ and the ‘unworthy’ poor, we can, to a certain extent, change the world.
We can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world.”[iii]
Isn’t that a lovely image … an oasis – a spot of water in a dry land, a bit of lush green in the midst of drab brown, a place for people to gather and be filled, a place of blessing!
That image echoes the message that Jesus has been proclaiming ever since he burst on to the scene when he read from Isaiah at his home synagogue: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor …”
The unique thing about Luke’s version of the Beatitudes is that they also contain “woes” that mirror each of the blessings. They are not meant to be curses, but reminders to the rich, the full, the laughing, that they have a choice. They can revel in what they have and view the poor with contempt, or they can share their abundance with the poor, make a difference in their lives right now, and strive to build an oasis.
Most of us are not poor. We have enough to share … and we do.
But the temptation to forget Jesus’ words is always there ...
because one final association with Pt words needs to be highlighted:
“The sound begins the word “ptuo,” which is Greek for “I am spitting.” (The English cartoon sound, ‘ptooey,’ comes directly from this verb.) [So] blessed are the spat-upon.”
But that pronouncement is hard to accept, to embrace – because we are tempted to spit out of contempt or to ward off evil, like maybe your grandmother used to do.
Dorothy Day would never have called herself an apostle, but she was a messenger.
She ends her reflection on the beatitudes reminding us of the call we have all been given …
“[T]here is nothing that we can do but love,
and dear God — please enlarge our hearts to love each other,
to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend.”
She’s right! That’s the blessing we have been given to share. The saints have shown us.
[i] See Leviticus 12:6-8
[ii] I am grateful for Richard Swanson’s insights into Pt words, see his reflections at workingpreacher.com, 11/3/13
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