Pentecost 17
6 September 2026
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
W. Gregory Pope
WHAT ARE YOU HUNGRY FOR?
Matthew 5:6. Psalm 42.1-5. Amos 5:21-24
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him, and he began to speak and taught them, saying: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”
It is the desire of every human heart to have our deepest longings met and satisfied. Our greatest obstacle to meeting these needs ourselves is that we so often try to fill our emptiness with those things that cannot satisfy, that do not fill the emptiness. It’s not that our lives are empty, they’re just full of the wrong stuff.
C. S. Lewis wrote: “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition, when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” We focus on trivia and miss what matters.
I can have a rather serious craving for a ribeye at Downtown Grill, embarrassingly so. For months I’ve been hungry and thirsty for college football. And now dinner is served. Every once in a while, on my better days, I realize I can do better. Do I really need to see College Game Day, the 12:00 game, the 3:30 game, and the 8:00 game every Saturday? Yes! Yes I do! No, but sometimes I think I do. On my better days, I know better.
All the stuff we long for: money, entertainment, a nice place to live, and a secure retirement are all fine and good, but they’re all attempts to fill an empty place. We need more. When we get what we thought we wanted, it works for a time and then not so much. Everything we try, all the false hungers and thirsts, Max Lucado says “they are salt water in the desert.”1
The audience gathering around Jesus does not completely understand that they are there because they are hungry for something more. Jesus looks at them, sees what they need, and says: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
What exactly are we hungering and thirsting after when we hope and long for righteousness? It’s not about just wanting to be a better person but desiring the well-being of others. Again Jesus returns us to Isaiah 61 where we learn that righteousness is a justice that rescues the oppressed and restores the powerless and the outcasts.
The root word of “righteousness” is the word from which we get justice and holiness. The biblical understanding of “righteousness” is a world where everything is in its rightful place – proper relationships between people, God and people, people and the earth – everything to be as it was intended to be. It is a personal longing to be free of sins, addictions, and cravings that tear our lives apart. It is a global longing for the whole world to be at peace. It is a systemic longing for all people to have access to good education, meaningful work, and affordable health care.
Hungering for righteousness means longing for God’s righteousness in the world and in
one’s own heart. Justice and righteousness are more than moral ideals. They are the very power of God moving into our lives and the life of the world like rolling-down waters and ever-flowing streams.
This longing Jesus calls “hunger” is the word for “starving” – the kind of hunger that makes you dizzy and nauseous – so hungry you almost cannot eat. The word for “thirst” describes a mouth that is beyond the feeling of cotton, the dryness of desert land. Real hunger, real thirst – is the kind that changes your life.
Do you long for the world to be as God intends it to be with that kind of hunger, that kind of thirst? It is the craving to see God’s right ordering of the world prevail, to conquer the systems of greed and hatred, apathy and exploitation – all that destroys human life and human dignity and creation itself. It is to cry out with the prophet Amos from the depths of your being to Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like and ever-flowing stream. Do you feel that hunger, that thirst? It is a godly craving.
In Luke’s proclamation of this sermon of Jesus, he leaves off the thirsting and the righteousness: “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.” It’s not that Matthew is saying Jesus is ignorant of physical hunger. We’re just given something deeper to hunger for. We need both Matthew and Luke’s version of this beatitude to comprehend all that Jesus was saying.
Matthew’s version is about hungering and thirsting for righteousness and justice – a spiritual hunger and thirst. Luke’s version is about hungry people who long to be fed: “Blessed are you that are hungry now, for you will be fed.” Jesus won’t let us separate the spiritual from the physical. Here’s the beautiful thing about Matthew’s version and Luke’s version side by-side: The one aching for what’s right will make sure the one whose empty stomach is aching gets fed. Jesus challenges his followers to remember that the physical is also spiritual. If we pass by someone in need and don’t feel a conflict in our spirit, then we’re confused about what it means to be Christian.
Gregory of Nyssa said this beatitude is talking about the spiritual food of justice.2 Mark Allan Powell says Jesus is calling out to those starved for justice.3 There are those who are hungry for food and those who are hungry for the justice that keeps people hungry for food.4
Later in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus makes our calling plain: Come, you that are blessed by God, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothing. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me. Then the righteous will answer him, Lord, when was it that I saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? . . . And the king will answer them, Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.
When we feel an ache toward something, but we don’t know what, that’s God calling to us. When we are brave to see and not turn away, that’s God waking us up.
In the late 18th century, before education became public, when learning to read and write was reserved for the wealthy elite, a British newspaper reporter named Robert Raikes was working in the prisons on reform. He began to see that education was the pathway to stability, and he worried about children who had no access. So in an inspired response to the Industrial Revolution, he dreamed up a system of schooling that would support children who had to work in the factories and mines six days a week for more than 12 hours each day. Because their poverty gave them no choice but to work, and the government didn’t yet provide any educational
support, Robert designed a free school for children to learn to read and write. They would meet once each week, in volunteer teachers’ homes, from 10 until 5, learning their letters, and reading from their only textbook: the Bible.
With the support of the Anglican Church, but entirely lay-led, the Sunday school model spread across Britain. Spelling books were soon created for the working poor. Crime rates dropped. The movement in Britain was so successful that the inspiration quickly spread to the United States. By the 1790s, the first Sunday schools opened in the United States in mill communities. Seeing the difference it made British and American governments made education free and mandated in order to teach children who otherwise didn’t have access to education.
Catherine Booth was a Sunday school teacher in London when she met her husband, William. He had been working on-and-off as a pawnbroker, with a little preaching on the side. Turns out Catherine was a stunning preacher in her own right. And because William’s work had brought him into relationship with London’s poor, he was drawn to the impoverished places. So in 1865 they began the Christian Mission in London’s East End. Their gospel work began by taking care of people’s basic needs: soup, clothing, shelter. William Booth is famously quoted saying, “You cannot warm the hearts of people with God’s love if they have an empty stomach and cold feet.” The Christianity they practiced was so needed, it spread across the world within decades, by the name Salvation Army.
The Industrial Revolution, while making a few people very wealthy made life so much harder and more dangerous for most people. In the late-18th through mid-19th centuries, Christianity was a life-saving force. Because of their faith in the way of Jesus, people were compelled to go be face-to-face with the poverty, and fill empty stomachs, inspire minds, create safe spaces.
Robert Raikes’ compassionate inspiration to open Sunday schools
was the very early beginning of the Christian Social Gospel movement – the Salvation Army and the YMCA all began during this time of intense urban poverty and terrible working conditions.
This was the same time Walter Rauschenbusch had a conversion. Walter was serving as a young Baptist pastor to a German church on W 43rd St in Manhattan in the height of slum-condition-tenements, child labor, and robber barons.
One day, while leading yet another funeral for a child, he couldn’t bear the heartbreak anymore. “This isn’t it,” he thinks. “Christianity has to mean more than this.” In his book that woke up the church, he writes, “No man shares his life with God whose religion does not flow out, naturally and without effort, into all relations of his life and reconstructs everything that it touches. Whoever uncouples the religious life and social need has not understood Jesus . . . The fundamental purpose of Jesus was the establishment of the kingdom of God . . . a movement pledged to change the world-as-it-is into the world-as-it-ought-to-be.”
Pastor Rauschenbusch saw the pain of the world he was living in for what it was and had the courage to not look away, to allow it to change him. He began to preach adamantly that Jesus comes not just to save our souls, but to mend our bodies. If Christianity didn’t make a difference in people’s every day lives – if it wasn’t putting food in their stomachs and socks on their feet, if it wasn’t saving actual lives, then it didn’t have the power of Jesus in it.
There is an unbearable amount of pain in our world. There are still too many empty stomachs and cold feet, too many people who work 50 hours of week but have no health care and cannot afford a decent place to live. Our society is not set up for everyone to thrive. In fact, as the stock market booms, our society is becoming less compassionate, less helpful to the poor by the day.
This hunger and thirst for God’s justice and righteousness begins with a desperate longing for
God, given voice in the prayer of the psalmist: My soul thirsts for the living God, like a deer pants for water, so my soul thirsts for you, O God.
Loving and longing for God will help us create a life that matters around things that are important. What hunger for justice burns inside of you? How would you like to see the world become different and better?
The blessing of this beatitude is that those who hunger will be satisfied, filled. Both the spiritually hungry and the physically hungry will be fed. The blessing is the contentment of eating when hungry and seeing the hungry fed and watching justice roll down like an ever-flowing Niagara Falls.
Fed by whom? God, yes, and by God through us. When Jesus fed the 5,000 what did he start with? A young boy’s two loaves and five fish, the staples of the near-eastern diet. Jesus did not conjure them out of thin air. The boy offered them, and Jesus multiplied them. He’s doing it all the time – through us!
We must also address the social systems and structures of sin which keep so many in the world poor and hungry. We not only rescue the people drowning at the bottom of the stream, we go upstream to see why they are falling in.
Our hunger and thirst for a new world is a physical craving. Jesus says, “Blessed are you if you know what it is to hurt in the pit of your being for things to be better. Blessed are you when your body craves the world as it should be. Blessed are you when you grieve for the world the way it is so much that you give your life to God’s love and desire for justice. Blessed are you when you see how the world is with all its suffering, and it disturbs your sleep and state of mind. Blessed are you when you can’t make the tension go away no matter how hard you try.” The hunger and thirst are signs that you get it: the world works as it is for some people, but not for everyone
When we hunger and thirst to do the right thing – that blessed craving, that ache of desire is God within you. Because it’s in that place, in that pain, in that ache, in that longing, in that desire, in that awareness, in that hunger and in that thirst, that Jesus announces, “The kingdom will satisfy you!”
These challenging days in which we live are an opportunity. They call us to have the courage and imagination to picture our lives and the lives of others in a new way. The world becomes a better place when we imagine the world as it could be and decide to use our power for good. When we can’t not go, serve, do, share, that’s God filling us up with the true beauty of the world.
And then when we can’t keep going, when we have to rest, that’s God proving to us God is still God. It is not up to us to save the world. Jesus has already done that. It is up to us to crave the world Jesus talks about and go after it, so we can be filled with joy, hope, love, gratitude – the gifts of God for us now. May it be so.
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1. Max Lucado, The Applause of Heaven, Word, 1990, 95.
2. Rebekah Eklund, The Beatitudes Through the Ages (Grand Rapids, Michigan:
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2021), 153.
3. Eklund 159
4. Eklund 159