Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. (Matthew 5:6)
I usually pay more attention to passages of scripture that describe desires rather than actions. I spent a lot of my life in a type of Christianity that rewarded actions, that interpreted the Bible as a “how-to” manual that tells us which actions we must do and which we can’t. Of course that is in the Bible, but there seems to be just as much (if not more) that talks about our desires for God, for the world, for each other.
This verse seems to describe desires in a way that is so primal, so human, so basic. Blessed are those who are hungry, who are thirsty for righteousness. “Righteousness” can be the tricky word there. How do you think about righteousness? Seriously, take a second and think about what that word means.
Walter Brueggemann says, “Translators choose ‘righteousness,’ which is right living, or right relationship with God… In the Beatitudes… when we hunger and thirst for righteousness… it could easily be ‘justice’ as well.”1 What he is getting at is that this word really is describing right relationships with God and with the world around us.
What does it mean to be hungry, to be thirsty, to desire right relationships? What does that look like in the world today? What does that look like in your life?
I keep coming back to the beatitudes being about people rather than virtues. And people are messy. Blessed are the people who desire right relationships. Not those who have them already. Not those who have it all together. Blessed are those who want, who ache, whose hearts hurt at the brokenness in the world. Blessed are those who feel that we are too lonely, too disconnected, that too many people don’t have enough (food, housing, healthcare, love).
I wonder if Jesus was thinking of John the Baptist (who he saw just a chapter earlier) when he called the desire for righteousness blessed. John, out in the wilderness, dressed in camel’s hair with a belt around his waist. John, yelling to anyone who would listen, that things needed to change. John, aching for “hearts and lives” to change. The change he wanted was so that the “kingdom of heaven” could be the way people live: right now.
Do you know of someone who longs for change in the world like this? How do you think of them? Do they inspire you? Challenge you? Offend you? Do you think of them as blessed?
…for they will be filled. The second half of these blessings has been an unsettling place for me. I like the blessing part, that Jesus sees and names something beautiful and holy. But the waiting, “for they WILL be filled,” that’s harder for me. And maybe that’s where the desire, the longing is. A promise and a hope for the future, but it is not now. The desire for right relationships, for justice, for righteousness is blessed, but that filling, we might have to wait on that. Gosh – that feels really painful right now.
What desire or longing do you have right now? What is it that you want to see made right? What relationships, right way of living or being do you long to have filled? Offer that to God.
May you be blessed in your longing today. May those places of waiting for things to be put right be places of hope. May the hard, but holy, desire in you be part of your gift to the world. May you be blessed with a softness in the meantime. May your hope for the world, for relationships, for righteousness not make you bitter. May you continue to fight, long, desire, cry out for the brokenness of life. May you not stop caring for the little places, the out-of-the-way people, whatever breaks your heart. May God hold you in the light, in the dark, with good friends, good food, good books and TV shows, good walks in the woods, good, good sleep. May you be held by whatever keeps you tender as you desire. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
- Walter Brueggemann, on justice and righteousness, PC(USA), On Justice and Righteousness (June 26, 2019). ↩︎
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