FOOD FOR THOUGHT

 

“Fortunate are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be fed.”

Makarioi hoi peinōntes kai dipsōntes tèn dikaiosunèn, hoti autoi chortasthèsontai.

 

In our time, in Western societies, those who ‘hunger and thirst for justice’ tend to be those we see on television demonstrating in the streets for a righteous cause, usually on behalf of some group of people less fortunate. But in simpler societies, the people indicated in this sentence are the downtrodden, the oppressed, the cheated themselves, hungering and thirsting for justice. And the ’justice’ referred to here is not ‘social justice’ but downright legal justice as meted out by a righteous judge. We get a picture of the situations meant when we read the Psalms. Time and again we meet references to false witnesses, to the poor being robbed of what little they have, of unjust judges and neighbourhood tyrants: the overall picture is more that of some Neapolitan slum with its slumlords and its judges in the pocket of the Mafia. Here it is the poor who are the victims and who hunger and thirst for equitable justice, for honest judges, for witnesses who will tell the truth. They do not ask for charity; all they want and need is for decent institutions manned by decent people who will award them what they are entitled to. And this need goes right to the bone. It is not something that it would be nice to have: it is as necessary as the most basic food and drink.

 

The victims are turned out of their meagre lodgings, they are impoverished by being forced – sometimes at sword- or gun-point – to pay the vig on a desperate loan, they are jailed for stealing food for their children. So, in the Psalms that are so often the background, the score, the text for Yeshua’s words and actions, they cry to the heavens: ‘Up, Lord, do something!’ ‘Lord, judge thou my cause: thou seest that I am innocent!’ And all too often, nothing happens, the heavens do not open, the oppressors are not struck by lightning.

 

This, I think, is the background to this Beatitude. In the Reign of God that is now beginning; under the new Torah, the new Law that will go further than the old because it is a Law of Inwardness; the poor who hungerand thirst for justice, for righteousness, for simple decency, will be fed. Again, this metaphor of feeding is so often met in the Psalms -- ‘my soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness’ – and in the closely-related Isaiah: ‘And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined.’ For those who often go hungry, in a world where the rich are fat and the poor mere skin and bones, the promise of being fed, well fed, richly fed, is a pleasure and a joy. 

 

Now: why and how ‘will’ this happen under the new Law? Is it a promise for some unimaginable time in the future, to be realised in one great sweep by a distant Saviour? Is Yeshua’s audience being promised ‘pie in the sky’? I think we should read it differently. The basileia tou Theou, the regnum Dei, the Kingship (not ‘Kingdom’!) of God is that of the Meshiach; the Meshiach in question is Yeshua; therefore, it is here and now. On the other hand, it has to be realised by humans. So the key is the new Torah of Inwardness. What will feed the hungry is the fact that a judge who believes in Yeshua and ‘follows his words’ cannot give unjust judgements; a man who believes in Yeshua, if he is called as a witness, cannot give false testimony; a landlord who believes in Yeshua cannot cheat or brutally evict a tenant family. Once again, what is spoken here is the description of a situation that has not hitherto been brought about but that will be – and in the English translation shall, must be – brought about.