Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Matthew 5:8
New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned on March 12, 2008 after it was discovered he patronized a prostitution service. What bothered people most about this, it seems, was his hypocricy rather than his morality since Spitzer had promised, in his political campaigns, “ethics and integrity to be the hallmarks of [his] administration.”
When Jesus in the beatitudes spoke of the “pure in heart,” who and what was he talking about? Many Christians would say Jesus was pointing to sexual purity. That’s more or less what I heard growing up. I would suspect many others shared my experience. Even award-winning Christian author Philip Yancey looked at it that way when he discussed sexual temptation and giving in to lust in relation to this beatitude (The Jesus I Never Knew, 118, 119).
But a closer look at the word “pure” (Greek katharos) in this beatitude shows something else. One of the best descriptions can be found in William Barclay’s The Beatitudes & the Lord’s Prayer for Everyman (76-85). After reviewing the Old Testament concept, which for the most part referred to being ritually clean, he shows that katharos had a much broader meaning.
It refers to having unmixed motives, being genuine, transparent, sincere, pure in every sense, something with “no tainting admixture of anything else.” That makes this beatitude the most demanding of all. It shows what Jesus meant when calling Pharisees, who were perhaps the most devout of all the Jews, hypocrites and “whited sepulchers.”
One can be morally clean but impure in every other way. The hypocritical (impure) finds us all in some way guilty.
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