A Call to Divorce, Part 2 (cont'd): Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

First, let’s think about the words “hunger and thirst”.  I recently had a day of walking through a zoo in 95 degree heat with a blazing sun, there were few places to stop for a drink, and we didn’t eat while we were there.  I’d had my heart set on seeing all the exhibits and particularly my favorite animals.  I’d also skipped breakfast that morning.  Shortly after climbing the hill to see the rhinos around one o’clock, I’d had enough.  I was tired, I was weak, I couldn’t focus on anything around me and even my favorite animals couldn’t excite my attention.  I was hungry.  I was thirsty.  All I wanted was to eat and drink.  Even walking through the grocery store with my friend, when he asked what I wanted for lunch, the best response I could give him was “I don’t care, is it made of food?”

What we hunger and thirst for is nourishment, it’s the thing that keeps us going and enables us to do everything else.  We hunger and thirst for meals.  It is essential to us, and without it nothing else really has value.  It is not a simple preference, it is a thing we need.  It isn’t something we would like to have.  When we hunger and thirst, we feel like we are dying.  And eventually, if our hunger and thirst are not satisfied, we will die.  The righteousness for which we hunger and thirst is not dessert.

If I Americanize this beatitude, I come up with something like Blessed are those who satisfy their hunger and thirst, for they shall be whole.  It doesn’t particularly matter what we hunger and thirst for, simply that the appetite be sated.  We might long for wealth or leisure or comfort or sexual gratification.  It might be anything.  What is important isn’t what we crave, but that we crave.  And given the nature of hunger and thirst, the thing we want becomes vital.

Here’s the tricky part for Christians: the thing we crave actually does become vital.  We have the sense that if we do not have this thing, we cannot be a whole person and the rest of life is irrelevant.  It doesn’t matter how good everything else in life might be.  All that matters is that this craving is satisfied.  This craving becomes an essential part of our identity.  If this craving is not met, then we believe we are being wronged.  This essential thing is being withheld from us, and that is a violation of my rights and my dignity.  It is a violation of the very present American ideal of the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.

Where this spirit creeps into the church we tend to reframe our values or our views of righteousness itself, allowing our hunger and thirst for other things.  We believe somehow that God wants to satisfy our desires and wants us to find wholeness through satisfying our desires.  We have often forgotten that God wants us to find our satisfaction in righteousness as he has defined it and our wholeness in him and our union with him.  So we reexamine long-standing teachings to determine how scripture might support our desires and we ask ourselves “Does the bible really teach that?”  And if we work hard enough, we can always find a way to say that the bible teaches exactly what we want it to teach.

So before everyone jumps immediately to their pet sin that other people do and gets on their high horse about how they should long for righteousness instead of sin, let’s stop immediately and think about our own appetites.  And since my audience is primarily evangelical Protestants, I’m going to focus this on a thing that we tend to value above all other goods: marriage and family.  If you stick with me, I’ll show you the disordered nature of the value as it plays out in many of our churches.

Marriage is a good thing, ordained by God.  It is good for companionship and for procreation.  The church considers it a sacrament, or sacramental, or simply an intrinsic good.  And it is obviously right to do so.  But then it goes so far as to say that it is something everyone should desire.  And it assumes that it is something that everyone does desire.  It teaches young people about how to responsibly find a spouse and marry the person that God has set aside for you.  It creates singles groups so that unmarried people can hang out with other unmarried people (I won’t focus too much here on how singles groups create a class system within the church that essentially consigns single people to a ghetto until they are able to enter into the full life of the church community by getting married).  It will generally refuse to hire an unmarried man as a pastor and sometimes even to give him a position of any authority within the church.  (Obviously the Catholic and Orthodox churches don’t do that last one.  It’s more of a Protestant problem.)  And when unmarried people come to the church with their woes about loneliness or their strong desire to get married, they are often encouraged to pray for God to bring the right person to them or given instruction on how to become suitable for marriage.

So what does all of this communicate?  Simply put, marriage is a thing worth hungering for.  People often sincerely believe that marriage does make you a more whole and complete person, and that without being married, you will not be a whole and complete person.  To that, I would respond thus:  Marriage is not righteousness.  Do not hunger and thirst for marriage, but hunger and thirst for righteousness.  And when someone is hungering and thirsting for marriage (as with anything else) gently correct them and teach them to hunger and thirst for righteousness instead.

Now, I am unmarried and clearly I have some baggage about how unmarried people are treated within the church.  So for the sake of fairness, I will also turn this around on myself.  Celibacy is not a thing worth hungering and thirsting after.  It is not a thing for me to hold up as a highest good or to insist on for all people.  What is worth hungering and thirsting after is only righteousness.

How do I think marriage and celibacy should be viewed in reference to hunger and thirst?  Maybe the best analogy is that they’re dishes.  A plate and a glass might be very useful to me when I want to eat and drink, but I don’t have any desire to eat the plate or drink the glass.  I want the food and drink that they hold.  And I don’t need a plate to eat a sandwich.  Give me the food.  Give me righteousness, because without it I am starving; I am not starving for crystal.

Now that we’ve focused a bit on what I consider the more deadly and insidious problem or hungering and thirsting for good things that do not satisfy, we can turn our attention to hungering and thirsting for bad things that do not satisfy.  These are varied and I don’t plan to name them all.  Again, I would encourage as always that we focus on our own appetites rather than the appetites of our neighbor.

If exalting a good thing is like hungering for dishes, then exalting sin may be akin to longing for dirty dishes.  That’s right, dirty dishes, not rotten food.  Why?  Because God can still work good in us through our sin and I refuse to give any reader the excuse to look down on another as if that failure is significantly worse than their own.  Yes, the dirty dish might mean that you’re eating a lot of filth along with the nourishment and that you might get sick because of it.  But whether you’re hungering after a good thing or a bad thing, if you’re trying to eat the plate instead of the sandwich, you’re doing it wrong and you’re going to die.  Eating the plate is sin.  Eat the sandwich.

That being said, we cannot let our appetites affect our assessment of what is righteous and what is not.  We have very clear teaching in scripture and in tradition about what is right and what is wrong.  No dithering here, the teaching is clear.  We can tell ourselves all day that it isn’t clear, but that won’t change the fact.  We can wonder why this or that thing is righteous, which is fine, but we cannot refuse to accept the distinction between righteousness and sin or call good what is evil.  We cannot reorder righteousness to suit our own perceived needs.  This means that we also cannot take a morally neutral thing and exalt it above its station, calling it righteousness when it is not.  We cannot allow ourselves to hunger and thirst after the wrong things.

I’m using stronger language here than I sometimes do because this is essential.  If we try to satisfy ourselves with things that do not satisfy, we will die.  Our faith will collapse, our relationship with God will suffer and may ultimately fail.  We may divide the church or break fellowship with believers because our appetites are not being met within the church.  An unsatisfied longing for a thing other than righteousness can lead to emotional torment, physical illness, and in some cases has led to suicide.  Hunger is not static.  When a hunger is not satisfied, it increases until it becomes an imminent threat.  We must not satisfy hungers for unrighteous things, but we equally must not allow ourselves to hunger for unsatisfying things lest that hunger grow and consume us.

Now the merciful and understanding part:  It isn’t something that just switches off.  When we hunger for the wrong things, we truly are hungering for them.  It is seemingly essential to us and can even become wrapped up in how we view ourselves, the world, and God.  It is difficult to learn that while we are in a very real way defined by what we crave, we do not have to crave what is natural to us.  It is painful to starve a desire, but we can and must learn to do it and instead to seek satisfaction in righteousness.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.  I long for things that are not righteousness and I seek things that are not you.  Teach me to hunger rightly and help me to endure when I do not find satisfaction.