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Old Testament worship made special note of the prodigal nature of our appetites. The Law of Moses, with its long list of clean and unclean foods, seems obsessively concerned with diet. Some have interpreted these regulations primarily as a regimen for healthy eating, but I think the message is more serious. The list reminds us that we are addicted to an unwholesome diet. Righteousness is not our natural food. As a result, we are being consumed by our appetites. Like our first parents, whose hunger for forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden led to the fall of our race, we too long for food which seems good, pleasing, and desirable, but which will destroy us in the end. Even worse, our efforts to sate our hunger and slake our thirst ruin our taste for a better diet.

In Jesus' beatitude, we hear an echo of the prophet's complaint: "Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare" ().

Yet our tastes have been captivated by other delicacies. We log onto the internet and feast our eyes on things which sicken the soul. We turn on our televisions and get drunk on the wine of violence. We fill our stomachs with the bread of idleness and cast our leavings to the poor, trying in vain to suppress the gnawing desires that eat at our hearts.

So God takes steps to help us get over our taste for food that cannot satisfy. To our discomfort, the main tool he uses is hunger.

During Israel's years in the wilderness, God let them feel this hunger painfully. "He humbled you," Moses explains in , "causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord."

It's no wonder that Christ quoted when Satan taunted him in the wilderness. Ours is a hunger no earthly bread can satisfy. We don't want to spoil our appetite.

It's also no wonder that Christ sacramentalized our need for food and drink in the Lord's Supper, using hunger and thirst to point us to better fare. "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me," Jesus told a hungry crowd early in his ministry, "and I in him" (). In our effort to distance ourselves from the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, we Protestants have understood these claims primarily in negative terms. We spend so much energy emphasizing what Jesus does not mean that his words fail to whet our appetite. But the positive symbolism of the Lord's Supper is powerful: Christ alone can satisfy. Christ alone can sustain. All that we hunger for must be found in him.

Why is blessedness associated with hunger? Because those who bring their hunger to Christ will be filled with his righteousness. Thus, righteousness must be a gift before it can become a practice. The promise of righteousness is offered to those who are empty. It belongs to those who are aware of their lack.

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