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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.

We cannot labor for Christ's righteousness. Even if we wanted to work for it, we could not expend enough effort to obtain it. If we wanted to buy it, we could not offer enough money. We can't get it by loan. The only way to obtain righteousness is to receive it.

The language of filling in Christ's beatitude underscores another important aspect of the blessing. Righteousness works from the inside out. We usually go about it the other way around; we try to work on it from the outside in, as if it were a matter of externals. If we worship in the right building, perform the right rituals, wear the right clothes, and are seen with the right people, we are righteous. If we read our Bibles and pray in the morning, give a tithe of our earnings on Sunday, control our tempers and restrain our passions the rest of the week, we are righteous.

But if we listen to Jesus, we begin to understand why he attracted the sort of people who came to listen to his preaching: hookers and thieves, trailer trash and lowlifes, people who dwelled on the outskirts, in places where decent citizens refused to travel. If we dare to hear Jesus rightly, we understand why respectable, law-abiding people such as ourselves wanted to silence him. It is because this word of Jesus has the power to strip us of all we think we've achieved. This beatitude robs us of what we thought we had acquired and leaves us naked, destitute, and empty. If we are to have righteousness as Jesus defines it, we must receive it like beggars, letting it transform us from the inside.

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August 2007, Vol. 51, No. 8