If you're ever feeling particularly proud or wise or righteous, open up to Matthew 5 and sit down to listen to the greatest sermon ever preached.
The Sermon on the Mount.
Jesus never stood at a big wooden pulpit. We've got big wooden pulpits now to signify the glory and greatness and weight of the Word of God. Jesus was the Word and was God. And he needed no pulpit. He seems to have preferred seasides and hills, and I like to think that for Jesus, who had taken part in Creation, sinless nature was preferable to manmade temples. (Ironically, the Byzantines built one such manmade church on top of the mount, and eventually, after that had fallen to the ground, so did the Catholics.)
Anyhow, it's verses two through twelve that have been blowing my mind lately. The Beatitudes. They're standard Sunday school fare, but I know that as a kid I was thinking far more about when I'd get to play with the Matchbox cars on that big urban carpet (remember that?) than about what the Beatitudes really, deeply meant. So meditating on them now has been sort of like reliving Sunday school -- minus the Matchbox cars -- or at least what Sunday school should have been.
Loads could be said about the 'Tudes, and has. Rightly so, because in the Beatitudes we have a very instructive but brief -- and ever so radical -- portrait of what it looks like to live in light of the Gospel. But one in particular has struck me, and that's the one about hunger and thirst.
"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied." (v.6)
Interestingly, the Greek word we usually translate as "blessed" is actually rather closer in original meaning to "happy." Most translators haven't seen fit to distinguish between the two, but consider the Beatitudes rephrased as all beginning with "Happy are..." instead of "Blessed are..."; it strikes the ear differently to know Jesus was speaking more of contentment than of blessing, no?
Moving on, we've got the crux, the hunger and thirst, the emptiness that needs filling. Jars of clay, earthen vessels, that are worthless and without any kind of identity when empty. Really, hunger and thirst are the most human of sensations; they're reminders that our bodies require regular refueling, a kind of natural cadence that takes us to the table three times a day to eat and drink. Jesus says that ideally we ought to feel the same way about righteousness. We should seek it out regularly, and we should feel empty and hollow when we aren't in pursuit of it.
Jesus quotes the following verse from Deuteronomy 8 when he's tempted by Satan: "And he [the God of Israel] humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word [all words] that comes from the mouth of the LORD."
Righteousness is learned by listening to and meditation on those words coming from the mouth of the Lord, his revelation in Scripture; that is what we are to seek in our quest for righteousness. I've been jumping around through the Psalms lately (but jumping in an obsessive way), and I came across the very long, very repetitive, very good Psalm 119. Coincidentally (read: not coincidentally), it also begins with "Blessed are...." The amateur detective inside of me suspects there is a very conscious link between the Beatitudes and this Psalm. At the very least hearing Jesus's sermon draws us back to that Psalm, where we are able to learn more about what a hunger and thirst for righteousness might look like and feel like.
I'd include the entire Psalm 119 here, except that it's a hefty 176 verses long. To condense: It's essentially about loving the Lord's precepts (variously called his word, law, testimonies, commands, commandments, statutes). If "love" paired with "law" seems a strange combination to you, you've got company here. I struggled for awhile with what it means to delight in God's law. The clues, however, are contained in the Psalm. The Psalmist says, "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path" (v.105). And: "You are my hiding place and my shield; I hope in your word" (v.114). I could go on. Though we're tempted to see God's commands and precepts as terrifying (after all, mankind has proved that we can't ever hope to live up to them -- which is the reason for the Messiah in the first place), we see that God's guidelines for living are perfect. Jesus lived by them, and lived by them without fault. God's law is good enough for God, and certainly it is good enough for us.
We're not justified in the day of judgment because of our righteousness (which, by the way, means literally "being the way one ought to be" before God). In fact, there are many people who do not believe in the God of the Psalmist who are in some ways better people than some who do believe. There are meek people who do not believe. There are mourning people who do not believe. There's Gandhi. Righteousness is not the root of our salvation (praise God!), but rather the fruit of our salvation. (John Piper has put it this way. By the way, I think I might name my firstborn John Piper.) We begin to live according to the Beatitudes because we are redeemed by our faith in Christ, not in order to become redeemed. We pursue righteousness because we have been granted salvation by faith, not in order to be granted salvation. Our pursuit is post-salvation, and that pursuit is by prayer and engagement with Scripture. So glad to have worked that out.
Finally, there is the last bit of the hunger-and-thirst Beatitude: the promise. This is Jesus's assurance. Not only will we be blessed (and/or "happy") if we seek after righteousness as we hunger after food and thirst after water, but in the end our seeking will not be in vain. "They shall be satisfied." (In the Greek: "They will be fed.") If we pursue righteousness by meditating on God's Word, seeing the perfect exemplar of righteousness in Jesus himself, we will grow in righteousness. Jesus says later in his sermon, "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you" (7:7). Seek righteousness, and you will find it. For, if sinful man still knows how to give good gifts to his children, "how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!" (7:11). He is faithful, even if we are not.
These are the things I've been learning lately. Strangely (read: not strangely at all), all these strands of seemingly unrelated things have come together in righteousness of all things. A nudge from the Lord, I'm very sure.
I once felt very proud and very wise and very self-righteous, and then I met the God of the Bible.
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