Luke 6:20
Luke 6:2020Looking up at His disciples, Jesus said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
— Jesus's blessing on the poor — is rarely emphasised in JW publications. The Watchtower's eschatological frame promises material restoration on the paradise earth after Armageddon, so present poverty is treated primarily as a temporary affliction to be endured rather than as a state Jesus pronounces "blessed." The verse sits in tension with both the Watchtower's substantial real-estate holdings and the prosperity- gospel critique JW publications level at televangelists.
Use to dismantle prosperity-gospel theology, the scandal that JWs rightly identify in Copeland, Osteen, and Dollar. Jesus did not promise material wealth to the faithful; he blessed the poor directly. Pair with ("easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye…") and (the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil). The verse is also a useful mirror to hold up to any religious organisation that accumulates wealth while telling its poorest members to donate more. The point is not that the Watchtower runs a prosperity gospel — it does not — but that the structural critique of money in religious movements applies to any movement, and Jesus's words on wealth do not give exemptions to organisations whose authority claim makes refusal hard.
The NWT renders makarioi as "Happy are you" rather than the standard "Blessed are you." The substitution is part of a systematic NWT pattern across the Beatitudes (compare , , ). Standard English translations preserve "blessed" because makarios in biblical usage names a state of divine favour resting on a person, not a subjective emotional state of cheerfulness. "Happy" recasts Jesus's Beatitudes from declarations of God's blessing into descriptions of human happiness — flattening the covenantal-theological category that the Sermon on the Plain depends on.