The blessedness of those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.
"Blessed are they which do hunger … for they shall be filled." This Beatitude is, among all the others around it, as the spread banquet of religious meditation. It may have the just effect of surprising us, with a very unaccustomed hopefulness as to human nature. It challenges us to believe that there is left surviving still in us a germ and force of spiritual nature that can rise to appreciate that which is the highest of things that are holiest. It postulates the possibility, though it were only a possibility, of our attaining the disposition to feel in genuine, unfeigned sympathy with it, that principle of so lofty height; and so much so as to long with the longing of hunger and thirst to live, actually live, in practical harmony with it, and habitual exemplification of it. Such encouragement is not the illusion of vanity, or of self-sufficient exaltings of what man is or may be; it is the outcome of the knowledge, the gracious condescending love and power of that true Teacher, and the Lifter-up of our souls, who spoke the Beatitude—spoke it in that strange gathering and at that strange time of day. In what he said we may certainly repose the confidence of hope and of firmest faith. Let us ask—
I. WHAT IS THE THING HERE CALLED RIGHTEOUSNESS? The word may well be a study. It may well and most wisely be intended for a study. How much—a compressed volume in a word—must there be condensed in the quality, the disposition, the power, the great reality, be it what it may, which Christ here calls righteousness! It is the thing man failed of at the first, and spoiled fresh-born human nature. It is God's own undeviating rightness; the unfaltering love of that which he unfalteringly loves, and unfailing practice of that which he unfailingly practises. It is, indeed, the supreme ideal, but the most undoubted reality. It soars to highest thought, and to lowliest practice it stoops. It is "exceeding broad," but fine and penetrating as a "two-edged sword." God's Law, God's will, God's love, the moral projection of the heavenly kingdom on earth, how great, how wise, how generous, how omnipresent, filling all spaces whatsoever like the flowing tide to all the world, it must surely be! The type of moral perfection is that which constitutes the righteousness here spoken of, in which a perfect moral nature rests in satisfied blissful repose, and for which our imperfect moral condition should make us hunger and thirst. Whether the knowledge of that type is reached by us direct from the pattern in the heavens, and in the Divine Being himself; or whether we attain it with Divine help through a perpetual exalting of each and every germ and tendency and quality of goodness that our human nature has ever shown, is comparatively immaterial to inquire. We are persuaded of its existence, and we have some knowledge of its proportions, according to the greater advance or the backwardness of our own moral discernments. And though the image be all too broken, the reflection too uncertain and scattered, like that upon the sin face of troubled waters, yet there is this strange fact to be noted, that while entirely lost in none, all perhaps have a completer notion and scheme of it than they, for the most part, care to own to. Such is its reality, its vitality, and its deep-cut graving on the heart I
II. WHAT ARE THE THINGS WHICH LIE INCLUDED IN THE DESCRIPTION OF "HUNGERING AND THIRSTING" AFTER IT?
1. The unfeigned belief in that perfect thing called righteousness, and the acknowledgment of the principle that the righteousness of a perfect life should be still and always the object of endeavour, kept before the gaze of even fallen man. Even for him it is still the genuine ideal. Though we should never actually attain it here, the sight of it and the attempt to reach it will not be fruitless. These will be preservatives against dissipation. They will guard against despair. They will exert a constant practical elevating influence. They are the protest against a false creed, and the very pernicious creed, that we are not in any sense required to live to the same standard to which we were once created; and that as to attain it perfectly may be impossible, so it is nugatory to try, and matters less than nothing how little we try. Merely in this view of it, this Beatitude was a startling announcement and novelty for those, in their very degraded national state, whose ears first received it from those most gracious lips that first spoke it. Is it not for unnumbered millions still the same, and for us all far too much the same?
2. The genuine craving, continual craving, intense craving, of the soul after it. The unresting deep want, the unquenched aspiration so well known to the heart, must have exchanged other objects for this supreme one object. It is the gift of God. As such it justifies the asking of it, that it show the depth, determination, and lastingness of divinely implanted qualities. The desire of all the nature after righteousness must be at least strong and real as nature, for so it is called "hunger and thirst," the figurative language serving its purpose to the furthest extent possible, but none the less, as we well know, in fact inadequate, as figure should always be to fact. The spiritual appetite here shadowed forth must be, and. when in its perfection has shown itself so many times, a far more powerful, commanding, consuming force than all mere natural appetite. It has borne the greatest strain, faced the greatest perils, dared all enemies, and "overcome the world," within and without. Yet nevertheless, in the quieter times of the world's course and our own individual history, it is pre-eminently entitled to ask time to grow, to find food, to gain strength and robustness, to learn its own high quality, and feel its own intrinsic force. For often the desire that feared itself and distrusted itself, that did not know whether it would live and could stand certain chili winds, has been rooting itself the more firmly, and has become the dominant holy passion of the soul. That which did not look quite like it at first has become the genuine, constant, and intense craving of the soul.
III. WHAT IS THE GROUND ON WHICH CHRIST PRONOUNCES THOSE BLESSED WHO HUNGER AND THIRST AFTER RIGHTEOUSNESS? The ground which our Saviour assigns for the blessedness of such is that their desire shall not be mocked; shall not find itself empty, hollow, and such as must come to nothing; shall not find itself unsatisfied. They shall have, have enough, "be filled," but be filled without being sated! How many desires, how many hopes, how many objects of pursuit, how many worthy and even noble enterprises and high-pitched ambitions, fail of fruition; or, not entirely failing of fruition, yet fail of such satisfying and such being satisfied as will bring them up to the meaning of Christ when he says, "for they shall be filled"! It is an infinite loss that we court, that we incur, when we leave unsought, uncared for, the abiding, the satisfying, the unstinted abundance, for that which wastes, perishes in the using, and does not fill the infinite capacity of a human heart.—B.