I have never been to the Holy Land, but I have heard the land described. The "desert" in Palestine is not made up of sand dunes, but of parched, rock-filled crusty soil. It quickly turns to dust in the long dry seasons. This is an arid land where water was used only for the most essential needs. When the rain falls, the thirsty land is satisfied and in a few days the land rejoices with blossoms shooting up everywhere in beautiful array. Soon again the dry season returns, the harvest ends, and the problems of hunger and thirst return to the people.

Satisfying thirst is, quite literally, a matter of life and death. Jesus fed human hungers. He fed the hunger with food: He taught us to pray for our daily bread. It is hard for us to understand the hunger and thirst those people felt and many today still feel. Most of us suffer from what Robert Louis Stevenson referred to as "the malady of not wanting." Few of us really know what it is like to live with a life-threatening scarcity of food and water.

Like the other beatitudes, this may have seemed like a nonsense statement to the first listeners. Life was lived on the edge of starvation. Bread and water were precious commodities. People would hardly find their hunger and thirst satisfied with something as abstract as "righteousness."

In one manner or another, we all have hungers and thirsts we seek to satisfy. But we can seek satisfaction in ways that never remain satisfying. I once spoke with a man who owned a chemical company. He told me about chemicals he sold to beverage makers that they put in their drinks so that our thirst is never quite quenched. Remember the ad that had as its slogan, "The one beer to have when you're having more than one"? Is it surprising that bars serve salty pretzels and peanuts to increase thirst rather than satisfy it?

We are too easily content with a satisfying moment, but do not strive for a satisfying life. When we have a cheeseburger and a Coke, we feel filled for a while, but want something else soon after. Within an hour or two of the close of this service, most of us begin craving food and drink. We do that every day, usually many times a day. Here Jesus challenges us not just to make things right with our need for nourishment, but to make things right for a hungry world, to crave a world that is right and just, as often and as intently as we crave food and drink.

This is a challenge to examine that for which we hunger and thirst. John Stuart Mill said his life was changed by his suddenly asking himself this question: "Suppose I attain what I am now pursuing. What sort of man shall I be at the end?"

Jesus promised that there is a way of satisfying the hunger of the soul just as we crave to satisfy the hunger of the body. We try to satisfy ourselves with what we can see and smell and taste, but Saint Paul said, "No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived what God has prepared for those who love him" (1 Corinthians 2:9).

Hunger continues to be a terrible tragedy. Consider this image. A DC-10 is preparing to land. It is filled with small children. Some of the children sleep; others play and laugh; still others cry out for the harried flight attendant's attention. But just before landing something goes wrong and the plane plummets to the ground, killing all aboard.

Ten minutes later -- even before the emergency vehicles arrive -- another planeload of children crashes right next to the first. Ten minutes later, a third crashes. And the tragedies continue: every ten minutes, a jet falls to earth, all day and night, day after day, month after month. Such a great number of deaths is not far-fetched. The same number of children -- 40,000 -- die each day from hunger-related diseases.1

Jesus wants these human hungers to be satisfied, for things to be put right with the world, so that no child ever goes to bed hungry at night. At one point, Jesus criticized people for saying "Peace, peace" when there is no peace. Feeling content because we are well fed can keep us from feeling the unquenchable hunger and thirst of a needy world. We cannot be content with anything less than the peace and righteousness of God's kingdom.

Blessed are the dissatisfied. Blessed are those who possess a divine discontent. Blessed are those who restlessly hunger and thirst for a more just and peaceful world. Blessed are those who refuse to be satisfied with things the way they are and call us to do the right thing.

There is a story of a young man who came to Buddha seeking the true way of life, the path of righteousness. Buddha led him down to the river. The young man assumed that he was to undergo some ritual of purification, some type of baptismal service.

They walked out into the river for some distance and suddenly Buddha grabbed the man and held his head under the water. Finally, in a last gasp, the fellow wrenched himself loose and his head came above the water. Quietly Buddha asked him, "When you thought you were drowning, what did you desire most?" The young man gasped, "Air." Buddha replied, "When you want righteousness as much as you wanted air, then you will get it."2

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Jesus did not say, "Blessed are the righteous. They have all the virtue they need." That is like telling students they have learned all they need to know. They will stop studying.

Jesus was concerned that we are personally righteous. Our behavior and attitudes are important. Righteous living is important just as righteous living is dangerous. Once the great British preacher Charles Spurgeon received a letter from a man who declared that if he did not receive a certain sum of money from the preacher within two days, he would publish certain things that would end Spurgeon's influence. Spurgeon wrote back, "You, and your like, are requested to publish all you know about me across the heavens." How satisfying to have a personal rightness with God that everything about one could become public knowledge and cause no scandal.

When Jesus spoke, righteousness was commonly measured by what took place in the temple and the synagogue. It was measured by your attendance and contributions, and by keeping countless rules, traditions, and laws that had been added over the years by various religious leaders. For us to simply reduce this to "righteous" behavior avoids its larger meaning, and eliminates our hungering and thirsting for it, since we can convince ourselves we already have it.

That kind of righteousness is like perfume that makes you smell sweet, but really isn't part of you. This practice of religion was compared by Clarence Jordon to wearing a necktie and coat to church on a hot summer day. It is uncomfortable, but may seem necessary to appear respectable. These are social customs that fill certain social expectations, but do not fill our spirits.

It is like the rather pious churchman who was criticizing his neighbor for the neighbor's profanity. The profane neighbor replied, "Well, my friend, I cuss a lot and you pray a lot, but neither of us really means what he says."

Or it is like the story of a convicted criminal, a rough-looking character his fellow prison inmates nicknamed Spike. Just before his release from prison after serving a fifteen-year sentence, Spike had a long talk with the prison chaplain. He told the chaplain how much he looked forward for all those years to the time when he could hold up his head in society and live a good life.

Among other things, the chaplain advised Spike to join the church nearest to his home as soon as he was released. It so happened that the church nearest to the ex-convict's apartment was located on the edge of the rich area.

Spike called on the pastor of this fashionable church and told him of his desire to join. "My dear man," said the pastor, with more than a touch of superiority, "I do not think you would be happy here, though I appreciate your good intentions. Really, you would be most uncomfortable amongst my people and I am afraid it would be quite embarrassing to you and perhaps to them. I suggest you think it over and pray and meditate and see if God does not give you some direction."

A week later, Spike met the pastor on the street, stopped him, and said, "Reverend, I took your advice and prayed and meditated and finally God sent me word. He said I should not bother any more trying to join your church. God said He Himself has been trying to get in there for years without success."

Jesus was not primarily referring to a striving for personal holiness which tends toward illusions of self-righteousness. The word "righteousness" sometimes refers to us having a right relationship with God and a right relationship with God's people.

We are to long for the world to be right, for there to be a victory of good over evil. It is not looking so much for peace within as for peace to be spread abroad in the world. We cannot be content with how righteous we are, because the righteousness of which Jesus spoke is measured by doing right for others.

The blessed hunger and thirst are not to satisfy our own hunger and thirst. When we hunger for a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee, we also need to feel hunger and thirst for the hungry to be fed and the homeless to be housed. The blessing of this satisfaction is only achieved by dissatisfaction, hungering to do what is right for God and the world, not just for ourselves. To satisfy our own hunger has its own reward. To hunger and thirst for the world to be right is the source of the blessing.

To hunger and to thirst indicates an intense desire. It is like the expression, "I want it so bad I can taste it." But it does not mean we have achieved what we have set out to do. This is not saying, "Blessed are the righteous," but "blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness." It is like God saying to David "Whereas it was in your heart to build a house for my name, you did well that it was in your heart" (1 Kings 8:18). It is like Robert Louis Stevenson's comment that "to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive."

It is like children at play who want more than anything to be Michael Jordan slam-dunking a basketball. They will never be the player he is, but in hungering and thirsting to be like him, they continue to strive to play better and better.

It was in 1985 that singer/songwriter Bob Geldof organized the Live Aid benefit concert to feed the hungry. Geldof, lead singer of a rock group with the marvelous name of "Boomtown Rats," recruited the cream of British pop talent to record a song he co-wrote called "Do They Know It's Christmas?" Then he helped organize the dual continent Live Aid extravaganza which raised several million dollars. The theme song of that was "We Are the World." When receiving a reward for this, Geldof's comment was, "What these efforts have done is to make compassion hip again."

Predictably, this compassion for the hungry is, to continue the food metaphor, on the back burner. Feeding the hungry was high fashion for a brief season. Now it is on to other politically correct causes. This blessing does not come to those who are content that they have done enough, who then move on to another cause, any more than we can believe that today's lunch is all the food we will ever need. It is the divine discontent with an unrighteous world which leads us forever toward the promise of this blessing.

"Happy are those who want God's approval as desperately as a dying man, stumbling toward a desert mirage, wants a drink, or as a starving man longs for a crust of bread. They shall receive that which they seek." (The Pulpit 12/54)

"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled." (KJV)

"O the bliss of the man who longs for total righteousness as a starving man longs for food, and a man perishing of thirst longs for water, for that man will be truly satisfied." (Barclay)

"Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for it, for they shall find that it meets their deepest needs." (Jordon)

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied." (RSV)

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1. Tom Peterson, "Child Survival," The Christian Century, 7/1/87.

2. Told by Dr. Ralph Sockman, recorded in Allen, God's Psychiatry.