Charles Ellicott Commentary Luke 6:20

"And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed [are] ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God." — Luke 6:20 (ASV)

Blessed are you poor . . .—See Notes on Matthew 5:1. The conclusion reached there—that the two discourses differ so widely, both in their substance and in their position in the Gospel narrative, that it is a less strained hypothesis to infer that they were spoken at different times than to assume that the two Evangelists inserted or omitted as they saw fit in reporting the same discourse—will be adopted here as the basis for interpretation.

It was quite in keeping with our Lord’s method of teaching that He would thus reproduce, with more or less variation, what He had taught before. The English rendering, Blessed be you poor, is ambiguous, as it leaves uncertain whether the words are the declaration of a fact or the utterance of a prayer.

Better, Blessed are you poor. We note at once the absence of Saint Matthew’s qualifying words: poor in spirit.

If we assume the identity of the two discourses, then we must consider Saint Luke or his informant as omitting words—and especially important ones—that our Lord had spoken. This, obviously, presents a far greater difficulty than the idea that our Lord varied the aspects of the truths He presented, now affirming the blessedness of the poor in spirit, and now that of those who were literally poor, as they had less to hinder them from attaining the higher poverty.

See Notes on Matthew 5:3. It seems to have been Saint Luke’s special aim to collect as much as he could of our Lord’s teaching concerning the danger of riches (see Introduction.).

Note the substitution of the kingdom of God for the kingdom of heaven in Saint Matthew.