Thirsting for Justice
Lester Glick and Dan Miller are perusing a book of recipes for the restaurant they’re planning to open. These guys are obsessed with food. All they talk about is food. They dream about food. They take out books from the library about food. Soon they intend to open a restaurant. Thing is, they have no food. In fact, they’re starving. And they have been for months.
When the Allied Forces liberated Europe at the end of the Second War they discovered huge starvation. They also discovered that you can’t just give starving people a regular diet, not right away. Their bodies are too fragile.
So, in 1944 the American Government launched the famous Minnesota Starvation Experiment studying how to re-nourish starving people. Dan Miller and Lester Glick are volunteers. They’re starving. And as they discuss the restaurant they intend to open, they are exhibiting behaviour the experimenters discovered accompanies all forms of severe deprivation: complete obsession with the thing you need. For Dan Miller and Lester Glick it’s food. Everything is about food.
I tell you their story because of how it relates to today’s text:
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”
Few of us have experienced the pain and desperation of real hunger or dehydration. Jesus’ listeners, however, probably knew exactly what he was describing: that hunger and thirst express palpably our need for things we cannot live without. And that when those needs go unmet we experience a deep, urgent, desperate drive to fill them.
Interesting, that Jesus thinks righteousness is as essential to our existence as food and water. That without righteousness, without being righteous or our social world being made righteousness, we cannot live – not fully at least. We need it.
Interesting too that where righteousness is absent, Jesus thinks we ought to experience something like hunger; that we ought to feel a deep, urgent, drive towards it; to be righteous ourselves and to see our world made righteous as well.
Okay. But we should probably get a better grasp on what he means by righteousness and why should we think of it as one of our basic needs?
The word Jesus uses here is: dikaiosune. It’s a regular kind of word that just means justice. And its connected with similar ideas like integrity, virtue, correctness in thinking, feeling, and acting.
It has a more technical meaning as well, depending on context: the idea of each getting their due – each receiving what they are entitled to on account of their basic human dignity, their achievements, or perhaps their wrongdoings. Things are dikaiosune when everyone gets what’s coming to them.
No doubt such ideas inform the background to this text as well. But there’s a twist we’d should note.
Across scripture, dikaiosune first and foremost is a quality of God – it has to do with what God is: holy, fair, caring equally for his children. God is righteous. Which means, hungering for righteousness involves seeking something of God – that the kind of purity and justice that characterises God’s life would shape what we do and what we are as well.
It’s this idea I think Jesus has in mind a few chapters later when he councils us to seek first the Kingdom of God and all of God’s righteousness.
Seek the Kingdom and righteousness. What I think he means here is that that righteousness exists in relationships: one, in the relationship between individuals as God, but also in the social relationships that make up God’s Kingdom. He’s saying that we each need to be conformed to Christ’s likeness. But he’s also saying that our individual transformation results in just conditions between individuals. This idea comes out clearly in those texts about the two greatest commandments as well: to love God with all our strength, and our neighbours as ourselves.
When we seek God’s righteousness, human relations become more just, more loving, as a result – that’s my point.
But we can still press more deeply into why Jesus would regard hunger and thirst as appropriate methaphors for dikaiosune. It’s easy to see why it’s desirable. But why think of it as a need?
For two reasons. First, because our spiritual needs are real, just like our physical needs. And, whether we acknowledge it or not, we have a deep want to be in loving relationship with God. Just like food and water, without being nourished by God’s sustaining presence, we fall to a kind of spiritual death. But needing God in this way also means needing the right kind of relationship with God. It means needing dikaiosune.
Second, we also need justice in our social relations. We all know this – when something’s gone wrong in a friendship, or is unresolved with your partner, or you have a grievance against a neighbour, the feelings of discomfort and unease that result express something we desperately need: for things to be right between us, for dikaiosune. When that need goes un-met, our lives are diminished.
In other words, the language of hunger and thirst points to something real, deep inescapable need – that we need the satisfaction that comes from living in right relationship with God and with one another – for God to get God’s due, which is our adoration and obedience, and for us all to practice the kind of self-giving, sacrificial, loving kindness towards our neighbours which is their due - because it is commanded by God.
Now, from our slightly jaded contemporary vantage-point, with all the catastrophes confronting us, all this talk about righteousness sounds pious; too heavenly minded to be any earthly good. Today we confront global poverty; the virus; the rise of the robots – and on the off chance we can solve any of that, we then face climate change and the threat of extinction. What value is righteousness?
I go back to Lester Glick and Dan Miller. They exhibited an urgent, driving motivation towards what they needed most. Their example suggests a question: what if our obsession, our most fundamental motivation was with loving God and loving our neighbour rightly – with manifesting in our lives the justice Jesus modeled: which was self-giving, self-emptying obedience, kindness and love? What kind of society would result? What kind of world would it make?
Would it avert catastrophe? I don’t know. Maybe. But if not, it might at least make us the kind of people we need to be when it comes time to confront those catastrophes. And in the meantime, it might make for the kind of life in which we can all thrive. And that’s something worth pursuing.
My prayer is that God would quicken in us that deep desire for righteousness, that we’d pursue it with urgency, and that our Church and our society would be transformed just as he promises. I don’t know, it might be just what we need to rise to the challenges of our age.
Perhaps, like me, you feel called to seek after right relations with God - putting God’s righteousness into practice, urgently and with a true sense of what’s at stake, which is our very lives and the future of our world.