Blessed are Those who Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness

Matthew 5:1-124

            There was a young man who was seeing a psychiatrist.  Both of them happened to be Jewish.  “I had the strangest dream last night,” the client said.  “I saw my mother, but when she turned around to look at me, I noticed that she had your face.  And you can imagine, I found this very disturbing.  In fact, I woke up immediately and couldn’t get back to sleep.  I just lay there in bed waiting for morning to come.  Then I got up, drank a Coke, and came right over here for my appointment.  I thought you could help me explain the meaning of this strange dream.” 

            The psychiatrist was silent for a full minute before he finally said, “A Coke?  This is breakfast by you?”  (parables, 20.11.3)

            It’s not just breakfast—perspectives vary widely as to what is a healthy lifestyle.  As a culture, we seem to swing back and forth like a pendulum about some things.  Just a few years back, the egg was on the bad list because of cholesterol, but more recently, people are encouraged to keep a few eggs in their diets.    A lot of people think that low fat diet is the way to health.  But Dr. Atkins challenged that with his high protein (high fat) diet.   In recent months it’s even been rumored that chocolate is a health food.  Well, I always knew that. 

This changing of perspectives has happened in many areas of life.  When we visited Laurel and Peter and two-month-old Jonah on Monday, they talked about how ideas of child care have changed.   Jonah sleeps on his back.  But just a few years ago, parents were told that their babies should sleep on their tummies. 

What’s up with all that? 

We want to live wholesome, healthy lives.    So our search continues for what foods are healthy, and what exercise will help us stay fit, what methods of child care will keep our family on the right track.  

The search goes on in the spiritual realm as well.  You’re probably well aware that in the Christian community there have been significant changes in perspective, too over the years about what is right to do.  Is it a sin to smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol?  It was when I was a kid.  What about social issues?  For hundreds of years the Christian church went along without addressing the issues of slavery or the place of women in the church.  The last 150 years have certainly changed that.  And in the last 40, our views on marriage, divorce and sexuality have been challenged as well.

In our spiritual life, as well as physically and emotionally, we want to find the right way, the healthy way, the way that will lead to fulfillment.  So we keep looking, searching, trying. 

For the past several weeks, the Beatitudes have been prodding us on this search.  And they have already challenged us many times to change our perspective.  To hear a new truth and let that truth change us and take us one step closer to that wholeness and contentment that we seek.  

 The change in perspective that the Beatitudes lead us to is more radical than whether eggs are in or out of our diet, or whether Coke is a breakfast food—it takes us beyond the debate of whether certain behaviors are sin or not.  The Beatitudes challenge us with a paradigm of Copernican proportions.  You remember Copernicus don’t you?   In the sixteenth century, people were very comfortable with their rather self-serving perspective of the earth as the center of the universe, until that comfort level was disrupted by Copernicus’s notion that the earth was just one of several planets rotating around the sun, and beyond that were other solar systems.   That rocked the world.  And this is the magnitude of change that we are challenged with.  To stop trying to do it all on our own, and let God expand our universe.  To teach us what will make our lives work better. 

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. 

This Beatitude challenges us to consider what is our basis for making moral and ethical decisions.  It challenges us to make a radical shift in how we view the world, how we make our decisions.  How do you decide what is right or righteous, wholesome and healthy?  What’s your baseline—your core values.  What your parents taught you?  What psychologists say?  The mood of your culture or peer pressure? Do you base your decisions on how you feel?  Often our decisions and responses themselves reveal what our base line is.  

For instance, consider the classic philosophical question:  Why did the chicken cross the road?  Someone with a lot of time on his hands came up with possible answers that certain famous people might have given. 

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Pat Buchanan:  to steal a job from a decent, hardworking American

Dr. Seuss:  Did the chicken cross the road?  Did he cross it with a toad?  Yes! The chicken crossed the road, by why it crossed, I’ve not been told!

Ernest Hemingway:  To die. In the rain.

Martin Luther King, jr.:  I envision a world where all chickens will be free to cross roads without having their motives called into question.

Grandpa:  In my day, we didn’t ask why the chicken crossed the road.  Someone told us that the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us. 

Saddam Hussein:  This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and we were quite justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it.

Fox Mulder:  You saw it cross the road with your own eyes.  How many more chickens have to cross before you believe it? 

Einstein:  Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?

Bill Clinton:  I did not cross the road with that chicken.  What do you mean by chicken?  Could you define chicken, please?

Colonel Sanders:  I missed one?

It all depends on your perspective, doesn’t it?  And we all have our opinions.  We all have life experiences that influence our view of the world.  But what about right and wrong?  Is everybody’s opinion equal in value?  Is everything  relative? 

Or, maybe the question is, relative to what? 

 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. 

In the Presbyterian Church, one of the things we value highly is individual conscience.  I can’t tell you what you have to believe or for that matter, what you should do.  That’s between you and God.  Individual conscience is a very important thing for us to maintain.   If we don’t value the individual, then we become a mob or a cult or Nazis. 

On the other hand, as someone once said:  it’s good to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.  At the same time that we value individual conscience, it is crucial for each individual Christian to seek to line up his or her life with the righteousness of God.  In other words, we all have different opinions about what’s right, but the opinion that matters the most is God’s.  

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. 

The Biblical idea of righteousness is always about a relationship.  If we are in relationship with God, then God has certain claims on us by virtue of that relationship.  Remember once again that these Beatitudes are for believers.  For people who have already said, yes, I want to follow Jesus.  Well, if you want to follow Jesus, you’ve got to get your life in line with his intentions.  This Beatitude challenges us to realign our perspective with God’s perspective.   Once we’ve realigned our perspective, then our behavior will begin to fall in line as well.  So, we need to make it our business to find out what God thinks is right.  How do we do that?  Well, if you follow the advice of the Beatitudes, you won’t go wrong.  In fact, the Beatitudes lead us to righteousness.  

Listen to how John Stott describes this process.  He says, “the beatitudes paint a comprehensive portrait of a Christian disciple.  We see him first alone on his knees before God, acknowledging his spiritual poverty and mourning over it.  This makes him meek or gentle in all his relationships, since honesty compels him to allow others to think of him what before God he confesses himself to be.  Yet he is far from acquiescing in his sinfulness, for he hungers and thirsts after righteousness, longing to grow in grace and in goodness.

We see him next with others, out in the human community.  His relationship with God does not cause him to withdraw from society, nor is he insulated from the world’s pain.  On the contrary, he is in the thick of it, showing mercy to those battered by adversity and sin.  He is transparently sincere in all his dealings and seeks to play a constructive role as a peacemaker.  Yet he is not thanked for his efforts, but rather opposed, slandered, insulted and persecuted on account of the righteousness for which he stands and the Christ with whom he is identified. 

Such is the man or woman who is ‘blessed,’ that is, who has the approval of God and finds self-fulfilment as a human being.”  (Christian Counter-Culture, 54) 

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. 

It will not be easy, this living of a life that stands with God, but often goes against the ways of the world.  But it is the one thing—the only thing that will truly and completely satisfy.  Are you ready to make this your life’s main pursuit?  Are you ready to search after it, and pursue it as if it were the only loaf of bread left in the world, and you were dying of hunger?   Are you willing to let it change you?  Then, you will find your heart’s desire.