“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”
Matthew 5:6
Holy Bible Holman Christian Standard Bible, Black/Burgundy, Leathertouch, Personal Size Bible. Holman Bible Pub, 2014.
AND
“You who are now hungry are blessed, because you will be filled. You who now weep are blessed, because you will laugh.”
Luke 6:21
Holy Bible Holman Christian Standard Bible, Black/Burgundy, Leathertouch, Personal Size Bible. Holman Bible Pub, 2014.
This attitude comes with a practical answer for our immediate needs. We are told that a certain hunger will be filled. A certain thirst will be slaked. Specific appetites are supplied specific sustenance from the table of God. It is a certainty spoken from the mouth of Jesus that those who desire bread and water from His hand will be completely satisfied. As Luke implies, the weeping associated with hunger will be turned to joyous laughter when they are filled with the bread that Jesus supplies.
A careful reader notices the difference between Matthew’s account and Luke’s account. Matthew speaks spiritually noting a hunger and thirst for righteousness. Luke speaks materially of present hunger without mention of the spirit. Which is correct? We must believe that the Bible is true, full and complete. When the Bible seems to differ in accounting events, we must assume there a synthesis of both truths is needed for our complete understanding.
“Come, everyone who is thirsty, come to the waters; and you who without money, come buy, and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost! Why do you spend money on what does not satisfy? Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, and you will enjoy the choicest of foods [enjoy fatness].”
Isaiah 55:1-2
Holy Bible Holman Christian Standard Bible, Black/Burgundy, Leathertouch, Personal Size Bible. Holman Bible Pub, 2014.
The Lord’s prophet Isaiah blends the spiritual with the material. We gather that it is as important to be filled with the bread that we receive by listening as it is to eat the bread of the mouth and stomach. Isaiah draws a direct correlation between our finances and our spiritual situation. Perhaps there is not as great a rift between the spiritual and material as we have learned to see.
Whether we walk in the parched land of the spirit or the Sahara Desert, God promises us satisfaction and strength (Is. 58:11). It is the satisfaction that comes from God which propelled martyrs such as Olympian and missionary Eric Liddell and German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer to pursue the work of the kingdom even unto death in the last century. The satisfaction that comes from God is so powerful that you can skip a meal and not notice. If you do notice the hunger, it pales in comparison to the riches in God’s supply.
“Not many of us in the First World know hunger, real hunger. We say we are hungry when we have a craving for sugar or caffeine, but have we ever really been hungry? We sometimes put ourselves through self-imposed times of hunger by fasting, and by so doing can begin to experienced a bit of what hunger is really all about.”
(Kinnard, p. 68)
Kinnard, G. Steve. The Gospel of Matthew – The Crowning of the King. Illumination Publishers International, 2004.
As Dr. Kinnard points out, hunger is a foreign concept to many of us. Hunger is an idea that many in the west think on with some passing melancholy. We want to feel like we know that hunger is terrible. Until we experience such pangs of hunger ourselves, it is hard to empathize with some other half of the world who wouldn’t know what it felt like to be gorged or stuffed. Many times I leave a table wishing I had eaten less. What would it be like to not know what being full felt like? I cannot answer that question. Many people are all too familiar with feeling full. Many others are glad to have eaten something at all.
Dr. Kinnard encourages fasting as a means of self-imposed hunger. We can learn to empathize with the hungry when we practice a fast. Fasting is not for the serious few alone. Jesus always expects His followers to fast (Mt. 6:16). It is never commanded but supposed of believers. What faith Jesus has in us that His Holy Spirit will cause us to have the will to fast. All Christians should be trying to practice fasting because Jesus assumes we will be. For further discussion of the concept, I encourage reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster.
“Jesus said, ‘Everyone who drinks from this water will get thirsty again. But whoever drinks from the water that I will give him will never get thirsty again – ever! In fact, the water I will give him will become a well [spring] of water springing up within him for eternal life.’“
John 4:13-14
Holy Bible Holman Christian Standard Bible, Black/Burgundy, Leathertouch, Personal Size Bible. Holman Bible Pub, 2014.
God wants to sprinkle our lives with His living water. He wants them to flow with His good graces in rivers deep and wide. “If anyone is thirsty” He tells us in the Gospel of John “he should come to Me and drink”(Jn. 7:37). He promises us a spring of water within welling up with eternal life. God promises to fill and quench us with His unending and eternal life. This is the food that surpasses all other tasty morsels, for which Jesus Himself would rather work than eat a meal at table with His friends.
This water is a free gift. There is no payment we possess that would begin to compare with the overwhelming perfection of this drink Jesus gives us from the waters of God. All that is expect is that we take and drink. This is the powerful imagery behind the Lord’s Supper. The table of communion or the Eucharist memorializes the first moment we received God’s grace for our sinful condition. Many will take this symbolism to further lengths of importance. It suffices to say that taking communion in community is important because it displays the mode of salvation that Jesus preached. We must all individually decide to take Jesus into our innermost being. He is sure to sustain us in this life to eternal life.
“These people are those who want, more than anything else, to see the world’s evil (including what is wrong in their own lives) overcome by God’s righteousness. (This yearning would have to include a willingness to do what is right themselves.) They want righteousness as much as a starving person wants food and as much as a person dying of thirst wants water. Jesus promised these people that God’s righteousness would finally prevail, and their desire for it would be satisfied.“
(Crissey, p. 31)
Crissey, Clair M. Layman’s Bible Book Commentary: Matthew. Broadman Press, 1981.
In her Layman’s Bible Book Commentary on the gospel of Matthew, Clair Crissey defines the character of the hungry. She draws a particularly important point. Those who hunger after righteousness do not only hunger after it for some temporary experience. They hunger after righteousness because they want to embody righteousness. They want to put righteousness on inside and outside. They want to take it in and wear it. This desire to live and breathe rightly is ravenous. Just like the person wasting away from starvation craves a crumb of bread, so do those who hunger and thirst for uprightness drool for purity and truth.
We must be comfortable being humiliated in our spirit to pursue righteousness. To embody the Word of Holy Scripture, we must be fine with being laid low by its teachings. We must be open to having our lack of righteousness exposed. In his Layman’s Bible Book Commentary on Luke, Robert J. Dean praises spiritual poverty and starvation. “Blessed are those,” he states, quoting Jesus’ words “whose poverty, hunger or distress makes them open to God’s reign in their lives” (50). Our personal poverty dethrones our self and makes way for the authority of God in our lives.
If we want to live fit for the fulfillment of the kingdom of God, we must learn to hunger for the Word of God. We must seek Him in private prayer. We must learn to call out to Him as one would beg for bread. We must take down the social masks of self righteousness and cling only to the righteousness of God. We must learn to take and eat of His righteousness. We must be willing to act out His righteousness in the world immediately around us. When it comes to our friends, neighbors and family we have the corner on the market in kingdom business. God has placed you where you are to be a beam of his brilliant righteousness in the world. Are you hungry? Take and eat!
“Remember, God is as Great as He is Good!”
Noah R. Hunt
POIEMA: Created for Truth 