Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. (Matthew 5:6)
When I was growing up, my family shared our daily evening meal at 5:30pm. The aroma of supper began to waft through the house half an hour before. When we heard the call “Supper’s ready! Come to the table!” the promptness of our response usually depended on the level of our interest in what we had smelled for the previous thirty minutes.
As our family assembled around the table and began to fill our plates, there was a clear nonnegotiable: We had to eat our vegetables. So, under silent (sometimes vocal) protest, I would grudgingly receive the minimum portion of cauliflower, broccoli, or brussels sprouts. I ate them because I had to. But the rest of my mom’s meals made my heart leap: homemade macaroni and cheese, ham, gourmet potatoes, meat loaf, sweet pickles, homemade apple sauce, strawberry jam. I’d eat until I was stuffed.
“Jesus showed that to be truly, flourishingly human is not merely to obey God but to want to obey him.”
Matthew 5:6, the fourth of Jesus’s famous beatitudes, rings the dinner bell. It’s Jesus’s invitation to an eternal feast. It’s a beatitude of desire: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” Jesus’s words are not mainly about what we think, believe, or do, but about what we want — what we crave.
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