It seems to me that the ‘Beatitudes’ deal with the marginalised, that Jesus speaks a great blessing of life and power into their lives. This reflects his life’s work – it is to the margins that he went looking for people to heal and restore; to the margins looking for broken people to bring them to a place where they could flourish.

There seems to be little that attracted Jesus to the centre, be that the political or religious centre. It was to occupied Jerusalem that he was headed, not Rome; it was on the city’s rubbish tip that he ended, not the Temple.

And so he begins his words of blessing with those who are ‘poor in spirit’. Not those who are strong in faith; not those who declare blessings on their life at every opportunity; not those who are able to boast about the amount of God’s presence that they have experienced, but to those who are humbled by their lack of spirituality and are prepared to acknowledge it. It is this humility that attracts Jesus and the Kingdom.