Thoughts on the Beatitudes, Part 6: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness; they shall be satisfied.

Before plunging in to Jesus’ next statement of happiness, let’s revisit the structure of the Beatitudes and situate the previous blessing of meekness. Looking at the verse to verse progression, it is clear that meekness sits perfectly upon its twin foundations of poverty of spirit (I have absolute need for God) and mourning (contrition over the fact that I’m not OK, you’re not OK, the world is not OK), and that it leads naturally into the declaration of blessing on those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Remember that meekness curbs our urge to control circumstances, people, environments, or activities, either through engaging in mental and emotional fantasy scenarios or by actual exertion of our wills, authority, emotions, or strength. Without the gift of meekness, we try to mold our world (and that of others) into a pattern and model of what we think is right or just – to make things OK for us. And we do so apart from submission to God and without leaving to him the providential role that he should have over us as Lord.

But when meekness surrenders to the Father and allows him to determine what is right, true, and good, it leads us to experience his desire for those very blessings. After all, most people quite naturally see something of what is wrong with the world; the very image of God in human beings, however marred, brings a longing for something better than the oppression, greed, violence, and perversion that make up too much of the daily narrative of our race. In a similar fashion, the vast majority of us wish that we could simply be better persons, a quality of humanity that we can readily ascertain in the accumulated tailings created by centuries of unfulfilled self-improvement plans, moral betterment, and New Year’s resolutions (which we have now had two weeks to revise, modify, or completely abandon).

The Beatitudes present something on an altogether different level. Gospel hunger and thirst are for something far greater than a vague hope that maybe things will somehow evolve into a state of acceptable decency. Our natural appetite for righteousness is usually pretty tepid and, when it is not, it is simply ardent self-righteousness. Moreover, it suffers from the contradiction of our insisting that there is no objective truth and our equal insistence that our version of what is right is the standard by which everyone and everything else are measured.

On the contrary, when Jesus blesses hungering and thirsting, he is talking about something keen and consuming. He knows our profound emptiness and understands the futility of any attempt to satisfy ourselves out of our own meager stores of wisdom or goodness. Jesus also recognizes that gospel righteousness is objective. The biblical word – dikaiosuné – means that which is right, true, just, or approved according to God’s own determination. I am not the arbiter of truth, nor is truth relative to how I perceive it at different times. What is true and right (and righteous) is what Jesus himself is, says, and does.

This is the unfortunate thing about hunger for righteousness: It cannot become anything very effective if it does not begin with the thought that I must be made right first. In the next chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus talks about specks and logs – he warns us about sitting in hypocritical judgment of others, seeing everyone’s crookedness but our own. Here again we see meekness and righteousness appearing as conjoined twins that we can never separate. In all of my fulminating and railing against the people and circumstances that interfere with my ideal world, I am simply displaying my own severe myopia. When I say, “I do not see,” then the Spirit heals my blindness. Otherwise, I remain in it.

Some of us, of course, are not railers, but stewers, fumers, and fretters. We don’t charge around like rampaging bulls, but slink about like nervous shelter dogs. There is an appearance of meekness but, when push really comes to shove, we’re prone to snapping at anyone who we think has been a cause of pain or disorder in our lives. There is no less a sense of judgment and self-righteousness in those of us who fit this description; it’s just that we internalize and generally keep it hidden from regular public airing, except when we are with sympathetic and like-minded sufferers, or when life presses hard enough.

Whether railer or fretter, we are all in the same boat. I hunger and thirst for a world under MY control, and so do you. I order my moral sense according to the things about which I have some distaste for whatever reason; or behaviors that I can “naturally” attain; or even sin patterns that bedevil me but which I judge when they appear in others. For example, I tend to strongly react to seeing certain expressions of arrogance, or of people misusing power against weaker individuals. Or I have a raised hackles experience when someone more aggressive than I uses the right turn lane to go straight – something I readily do in certain circumstances.

I remember watching a man chasing his girlfriend across our front yard several years ago. It was clear that he intended bodily harm. My pacifist philosophy immediately began to crumble, and the next thing this fellow knew, I was after him with a baseball bat. I can find myself in the same high dudgeon when someone cuts in line on the highway or at the cafe. My point here is that I don’t have the same visceral response to other misdeeds (a panhandler or bank robber need not fear my wrath). My hunger for righteousness is – like everyone’s – highly selective and even hypocritical. It misses James’ bald assertion that to break one element of the Law is to violate the whole thing.

How do we gain freedom from our limited perspective on what is right and true? As always, the Scriptures provide an antidote. In Psalm 73, the poet revisits a series of circumstances that drove him crazy: The wicked prosper; evil flourishes; the unrighteous grow in power and wealth. He is losing his cool and his meekness. What makes life fall into place is his entering the holy place of the Lord and coming to the declaration that “to be near God is happiness.” In worship, the psalmist finds that to truly hunger and thirst for righteousness means hungering and thirsting for God himself. The more we have of God’s life, the more we want what he wants and are at peace with the knowledge that he will bring it all to pass. The blessing is that we will be satisfied – first with him, and then with the fruit of his kingdom.

So, as we complete the first half of the Beatitudes, here is a prayer that makes sense to me as an expression of what these immeasurably great blessings mean for us:

Lord, I am not God. I have proven so by my failures (I see my poverty of spirit); have mercy on me, according to your loving kindness, for you will not reject or despise a broken and contrite heart (that mourns for where I do not live out or reflect the image of Christ); sovereignly rule over my life – I don’t have to have things go my way (I want the gift of true meekness); let me see you, give me your heart for what is right and true, and make me right and true so that I may live in and reveal the hope that your children have of sharing your glory and kingdom (I ask for your own hunger and thirst for righteousness).

If Jesus answers this prayer and so expresses himself in us, we will be satisfied indeed.