Oh, You Lucky Bums!

A wonderful discovery this week was finding Karl Barth's translation of "Blessed are the poor in spirit," as "Oh, you lucky bums!"

Well, almost. In German, the word is gluckselig, meaning "blessed by chance or luck" (gluck "luck" and selig "happiness"). Put the two words together and you have a profound spiritual truth: as Christians, we really are "lucky bums"...which is exactly what Jesus was trying to tell the crowds jostling around Him. You are bums! ("You are poor" in the Gospel of St. Luke, and "you are poor in spirit" in the Gospel of St. Matthew). Yet you are blessed.

The beauty of German, as well as Afrikaans, my second language, is its ability to glue multiple words together to form complex and often oxymoronic compound words hard to find in English, like gluckselig. Another version of this is Du Gluckspilz​​​​​​​, "you lucky dog!" or, literally, "you lucky mushroom," used pejoratively in the 18th Century toward upstarts who seemed to suddenly become rich, like mushrooms that sprung up overnight. But today it just means "a lucky devil" who hit the jackpot.

However, as refreshing as these etymologies can be, I cannot think of a theological word which best captures our oxymoronic luckiness as Christians than the Greek kenosis, "self-emptying," which St. Paul uses in Philippians 2:7-11 to describe what Christ has done for us in His death and resurrection. Nothing is more seemingly contradictory but spiritually essential than Christ's saving act.

[Christ] though He was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied Himself (kenosis), taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

MARK C. WATNEY is professor emeritus at Sterling College, assisting in its newly established C. S. Lewis Center. He has given papers at Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies, Dordt College, Lee University, and The Southwest Conference for Christianity and Literature. His essays and poetry have appeared in Philosophy Now, The Anglican Theological Review, The Other Journal, and elsewhere, and is the 2017 recipient of the Jacques Maritain Award for Non-Fiction.​​​​​​​