The Right Hunger
I was reminded in Zoomday School this week of my deep love of the Beatitudes with which Jesus kicks off the Sermon on the Mount in the fifth chapter of Matthew. All of them say something important about the character of a disciple, building on each other and focusing the lens through which we are called to live our lives. But this week I was struck most by the fourth Beatitude:
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
Emptiness leads to hunger. Over the past few months, we’ve done a lot of emptying—of activities, of connections, and of the comfortable foundations of our life—and no doubt we are starting to feel some hunger. Some of that hunger is a generic hunger, to be sure, simply wishing to consume the life we once knew.
But there is a hunger that twists our souls rather our stomachs and which cannot be satiated with just anything. It certainly can’t be satisfied with only those things we have lost during this pandemic.
As we begin preparing to lay the foundation for our new life, starting and stopping as we slowly step into some semblance of ‘normality,’ I wonder what our sparse lives have led us to hunger for? Is it as simple as craving the normal, the old way, the comfortable—or is does it go deeper than that?
Hopefully, we’ve learned to hunger and thirst for something much more than what we used to feed on. Maybe, the direction of our appetites have turned to something that will truly fill us and our lives—to something that can’t be lost in quarantine or social distancing: God’s righteousness.
Nothing else will satisfy us, fill us, or make us whole as disciples. Where do we look to find this nourishment? There is only one place we’ll find it: Jesus Christ.
“I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6:35). When Jesus says this, he is speaking as the embodied Word of God, which he offers to us as a feast of abundant life. In Matthew 4:4, he is speaking of the same feast, the banquet of eternal life: “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
We’ve spent too much of our lives trying to live on our bread alone—the bread of pride and self, the buttered toast of distraction and convenience—all of which we’ve been all to happy to provide for ourselves. Having been emptied of some of these crumbs, though, I hope we hunger and thirst now for the Word of God, God’s righteousness, and the true life that comes from him.
This is the daily bread upon which we not only survive, but also thrive as disciples of Jesus Christ.
