Matthew 5. 6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.”
Hunger and thirst are basic human drives, and they are about our survival. We need food to nourish, and water to refresh. Jesus is congratulating those who feel injustice like a hunger, and long for the emptiness that others feel to be filled, and satisfied. The life that is made right with God, hungers for that same rightness to be blessing for others.
The word righteousness has deep roots in Christian theology and experience. It means to be put right with God, but once that is accomplished, we are co-opted into God’s great purpose of making right. That takes us into repairing, restoring and renewing a broken and fallen world. That’s why we talk of the Gospel of peace, of reconciliation, of justice and of love for neighbour.
Again it is Luke who in his Beatitudes gets to the physical and material realities of what happens in a world of unrighteousness. (Luke 6. 20-22) When others are hungry, poor, or weeping, but we are satisfied with more than enough, and life is good for us but terrible for others, then to hunger and thirst for righteousness is to recognise the brokenness of the world, and in Jesus name find ways to make it right.
When the prophet Micah spoke the word of the Lord it wasn’t primarily or only about personal holiness. His concern was about the unjust, unequal, compassionless society in which the rich flourished and the poor suffered. “He has told you people what is good, and what does the Lord require of you? But to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6.8)
Jesus spent so much of his time feeding the hungry, eating with the lonely, giving a drink to a thirsty woman at a well, turning water into wine. And the permanent sign of God’s gracious love and the binding of humanity to God through the cross, is bread and wine, food for body and soul.
So when we truly hunger and thirst for righteousness, we know deeply and surely, that the work of the Kingdom of God is about feeding the hungry, giving refreshment to the thirsty, visiting the sick and the lonely, caring for each human being as one of the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters.
The love of God for the world is itself a hunger and thirst for righteousness. From all eternity there is a deep yearning in the Father heart of God to welcome home his children, to restore the ruined masterpiece of creation, and to make right the relationships that have gone wrong. But the promise stands; those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled and satisfied by a world redeemed in Christ.
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