In Jesus’ teaching, blessing is a deep paradox. It does not come to those who seem most likely to have achieved it. Its credentials are counter-intuitive. Blessing descends in sharp contradiction to the appearances of candidacy.
Take meekness, for example, a word that seems almost archaic when it intrudes into our vocabulary. By any common geometry of success in use today, it would seem rather to disqualify. Meekness clings adjectivally to those who are left behind, marginalized, ignored, considered not to ‘get it’.
Meekness and success? Oil and water.
Jesus sees the matter differently:
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
It seems that Jesus’ view of historical outcomes depends very little on the facts on the ground that powerful men and women can create for themselves. Denouement, in contrast, is for Jesus a ‘God thing’. He distributes historical and post-historical blessing according to starkly different criteria.
Like meekness, for example. Jesus seems to teach that a self-restrained regard for oneself aligns a human being with the divine program. The innate or more likely grace-inspired and disciplined preference for another’s tastes, desires, prerogatives seems a godly thing, one that places its practitioner squarely within the promise of things to come.
Inheriting the earth is hardly a marginal subpoint of God’s gift list. Indeed, it would seem to linger somewhere near the center of good things to come.
The meek, it turns out, are the ones who get it.
Canter Bridge 
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