Matthew 5:6

HUNGERING AND THIRSTING

‘Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall he filled.’

Matthew 5:6

What does this mean for us?

I. For ourselves.—Remember that the blessing, the high place in the Kingdom, the real attainment of what they long for, is for those who hunger for goodness, in whose heart it is a real, passionate, unsatisfied craving. That does not mean that good is easy, that a few efforts, the breaking off of a few bad habits, the giving up of a few unlawful pleasures, will make us happy and contented. God does not reward moral effort thus. His surest reward, the surest sign of His loving approval, is when He shows us how much still is lacking—some new self, some new enterprise. How shall we nerve ourselves to the quest.

II. For others.—God has not set us each by himself to purify as best we may each his own heart, He has set us together. He has formed us into societies, one within another, binding us by a thousand links to our fellows, so that none can stand without helping others to stand, nor fall without dragging others down with them; linking even generation to generation, so that the effect of our acts seems to echo through all time. We shall not love goodness, hunger, and thirst for it in ourselves, unless we love it, long and crave and cry, and strive to see it also ruling in the world about us. If it were true but of a few of us that our souls were filled with that sacred hunger, how would the world in which we move soften and grow pure and bright around us!

Dean Wickham.

Illustration

‘There is a representation in the Catacombs, on Christian tombs, and as the first sign of Christian life, of a stag drinking eagerly at the silver stream. This is the true likeness of hungering and thirsting after righteousness. When we toil towards the close of our earthly course, or in any especial period of it; when we feel stifled by the sultry and suffocating sense of the hardness and selfishness of the world about us; when our breath is, as it were, choked by the dust and trifles and forms and fashions of the world’s vast machinery, we may still join the cry, “I thirst for the refreshing sight of any pure, upright, generous spirit; I thirst for the day when I may drink freely of God’s boundless charity; I thirst for the day when I shall hear the sound of abundance of rain, and a higher heaven than that which now encloses us round.” Happy are they who, when they see generous deeds and hear of generous characters higher than their own, long to be like them.’