“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” Matthew 5:4
A Sunday school teacher asked the children just before she dismissed them to go to church, "And why is it necessary to be quiet in church?" Annie replied, "Because people are sleeping."
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A Sunday School teacher asked her class why Joseph and Mary took Jesus with them to Jerusalem. A small child replied: "They couldn’t get a baby-sitter."
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A Sunday school teacher was discussing the Ten Commandments with her five and six year olds. After explaining the commandment to "honor thy father and thy mother," she asked "Is there a commandment that teaches us how to treat our brothers and sisters?" Without missing a beat one little boy answered, "Thou shall not kill."
In the Old Testament time, when people talked about righteousness, it usually meant keeping the Ten Commandments. Jesus summarized the Ten Commandments into two, “Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love others as yourself.” So according to Jesus, righteousness is someone who has the right relationship with God and others.
Today we are going to look at the 4th beatitude, which talks about the fourth stage of a fruitful life, in which is when we become hungry and thirsty for righteousness. It is like a seed that is germinated and begin to sprout and being to hunger and thirst for water and nutrition. A person who is on his way to a fruitful life, at this stage, begin to desire for righteousness, and Jesus said they are blessed because they will be filled. This word “filled” in Greek means saturated. In other words you will be provided abundantly.
Remember the central teaching of Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount is Matthew 6:33, “strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness.” After mentioning the kingdom of God, Jesus touched on the subject of righteousness in the fourth beatitude. Based on Jesus’ teaching in the entire New Testament, “to hunger and thirst for righteousness” means to hunger and thirst for the right relationship with God and others.
Righteousness can be symbolized by the cross, which is composed of a vertical and a horizontal pole. The vertical one symbolizes our relationship with God and the horizontal one symbolize our relationship others. And the fact that the horizontal pole hangs on the vertical one means our healthy relationship with others depends on our healthy relationship with God.
Right Relationship with God
According to Jesus our relationship with God must be at the center of our focus. He said was must love God with all our heart, which mean we must love him passionately. We must love God with all our mind, meaning we must love him intellectually. We must love him with all our soul, meaning we must love him worshipfully. And Mark it has one more element, that we must love him with all our strength, that means loving him energetically. It is 100% devotion to God. I have talked about that many times, so we will focus on right relationship with others.
Right Relationship with Others
With our relationship with God at the center of our life, we love others as we love ourselves. Notice Jesus didn’t ask us to love others with all our hearts and souls and mind and strength. That must only be for God, but he asks us to love others only as we love ourselves. The reason is if you love a human being with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your soul, you will get hurt, because you are not created to do that and a human being is not created to take that. Human beings are not God and when you give all your heart, and mind, and soul to a person you are making him or her god.
Let’s learn from Jesus how he keeps the right relationship with others.
1. Practice Detached Interdependence
When I was young, my uncle told me to keep my friendship like “water.” He quoted a famous quote by a king in the Chinese history that says, “A noble person’s friendship is as light as water. A nonentity’s friendship is as sweet as wine.” I was never able to grasp the wisdom of it throughout my youth and young adult life. My uncle was warning me because he saw me having friends that seemed too close and tightly knit, which according to this wisdom could be destructive.
Robert E. Quinn says in his book, Building the Bridge as You Walk On It, that a transformational person practices “detached interdependence.” Overly attached relationship is not healthy, and we often get hurt by those that we are overly attached to. This often happens to the teenagers in love, and upon separation, they end up brokenhearted to the point that they could see no tomorrow. Individuality is lost in an overly attached relationship.
However, overly detached relationship is not healthy either. Therefore, we have to keep our relationship in a state of “detached interdependence.” It is a difficult to explain paradox that we have to live in. Quinn explains detached interdependence as an authentic relationship without losing focus on our purpose of life.
The word for “noble person” in Chinese happens to be defined as someone who knows the will of heaven. With this in mind, we can understand how Jesus defined his relationship. “For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” (Matthew 12:50) Jesus doesn’t allow his relationships to be entangled by kinship and affinity, but they are centered around God’s purpose for our life. Many people reading this passage miss this point and thought that he was disrespectful in saying so.
Remember, righteousness is having the right relationship with God and others. The wisdom is to center our relationships on God’s will for our life. Our relationship with others should always be a triangle, or trinity, with God at the top center. That’s the right and healthy relationship. Jesus said that God blesses those who hunger and thirst for such relationship. It is pure like water, and life-giving. Most importantly it’s fruit bearing.
2. Stop Reacting to Other People’s Reactivity
Edwin Friedman once said that most people spend their life reacting to other people’s reactivity. Mr. A might be reacting to what happens in his life and gets angry at Mr. B; and Mr. B reacts back with vengeance. Reactivity is often what makes relationship turn sour. Stephen R Covey suggested that the opposite of being reactive is being proactive.
Some people live in the so-called stimulus-response condition. They react or respond to others based on the stimuli that they receive. But, Covey argues that there is a gap between stimulus and response. A proactive person is someone who can take advantage of the gap, which allows him or her to make a choice before they respond.
We often hear people say, “You pressed my button and that’s what you get.” That’s the sad nature of a reactive person because this person acts like a robot—responding to the pressing of a button. It is not an easy habit to change. Sometimes we just have a surge of rage when someone uses certain word on us, or when we hear someone doing certain things behind us.
When we keep my hunger and thirst for righteousness in mind—that is to desire healthy relationship with God and others, God can help us make good choices before we respond. One particular method that helps me is to understand the fact that “hurt people hurt people.” When I am hurt by someone, I try to remember that that person must have been hurt by someone else or by some situation.
This method allows me to make a helpful choice as to how to respond to the hurt that came to me from that person. First, it allows me to forgive him or her. Second, it allows me to respond in a way that I might be able to help.
When Jesus was on the cross, you can say that he is receiving the most intense stimulus. In that condition, most of us would have been whining and cursing the entire world. But he was able to choose his response, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”
3. End the Blaming Game
I am not an expert in relationships, but as my spiritual life grows, I have learned from the Bible some important strategies to maintain healthy relationships. The first one is to stop the blaming game.
Unlike the traditional interpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden that the serpent lied to Eve, I think the serpent wasn’t really telling a complete lie, but he was telling a half truth. He said, “You will not surely die.” The real problem is when God discovered what Adam and Eve had done. Adam blamed Eve, Eve blames the serpent. (And the serpent doesn’t have a leg to stand on!)
I often wondered what if Adam and Eve took responsibility for what they did and confessed their sins, instead of blaming others. Based on the nature of a forgiving God, the serpent might be right is saying that “You will not surely die.”
Ever since the Garden, one of the major human problems has been the blaming game. You can imagine each time Adam came back home after a day of hard work, he would blame Eve for getting them to this situation that he had to work hard to bring food on the table. Eve would in turn repeat her blame on the serpent. Cane, their first son, must be brought up to think that the way to solve one’s problem is to cast blame on others. Thus, he blamed his brother for his problem and murdered him.
Looking at my childhood, I can find a lot of people to blame. However, I have realized blaming is often a human way to avoid responsibility. Blaming is to tell people that we are victims. Blaming can turn our focus away from what God has indented us to be.
Once Jesus was walking with his disciples they saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” They were thinking like the fallen human beings, asking Jesus who to blame for this person being born blind. Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. (John 9:1-3) Notice that blaming yourself is as wrong as blaming others.
One of the greatest wisdom against blaming came from Joseph in the Old Testament, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.” (Genesis 50:20) Joseph was sold by his brothers, became a slave in a foreign land, and was imprisoned for adultery that he never committed. If he spent his life blaming others, or himself, he would have missed the opportunity to be such a fruitful person in history. His life is a great example of a thirst for righteousness and God filled him abundantly.
Being able to live a healthy relationship with others is an important step to realize a fruitful life. But, all you need here is a strong desire, like hunger and thirst, to live in harmony with God and others, and God will help you fulfill that desire. Because Jesus said, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
