TRISTAN SHERWIN

Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s, Metro Christian Centre, Bury & Whitefield service (dated 15th August 2021).

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We’re continuing our series looking at the Beatitudes. [If you missed any of it so far, then you can catch it up on our YouTube channel, or with my blog notes (BE : AT // What is Jesus On About?; BE : AT // Blessed are the Cracked; BE : AT // Blessed are the Groans)].

As a reminder, Jesus is speaking to the people of Israel, his own people, in his ‘Sermon on the Mount’. They are tired of being under the boot of the Roman Kingdom. They are longing for God’s Kingdom to come on earth. They want comfort, justice, liberation, vindication, and mercy. They want to inherit what God has promised. They are restless, anxious, troubled. And in their frustration and anxiety, in their temptation to strike back at the empire and their desire to attempt and forcefully bring in God’s reign, they are forgetting their calling to be light and salt to the world, to be a blessing to the nations.

So, through the beatitudes, Jesus is inviting Israel to embrace God’s Kingdom: ‘Come, and be at this kind of life. This is how the Kingdom operates.’ We are also invited to be at (to join with) the kind of life that Jesus is describing.

We’ve already explored Poor in Spirit; that we’re invited to taste of Humility. We’ve explored Those who Mourn, and that we’re to be people who emit the sound of Lament: we mourn and we hope. Last week, Olivier talked about The Meek, and that we are to have the touch of gentleness.

This week we’re looking at Matthew 5:6, and I’m going to suggest that we are to be moved by a hunger and thirst for God.

READ: MATTHEW 5:1-16 (NRSV)

THE SEARCHING FATHER

‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.’ (Matthew 5:6, NRSV)

That’s an impressive statement, and an amazing promise. But what does it mean?

To some extent, we understand hunger and thirst—or maybe we don’t. Personally, I have never known actual hunger, regardless of how often I would tell my mum, growing up, that I was “starving”.

I know the munchies, a.k.a. the Snack attacks. They normally occur during the twilight hours whilst we are watching television shows like the Great British Bake Off or Master Chef.

Whether it be the munchies, or actual hunger and thirst, we do understand that these things are not emotions, but yearnings; a movement towards something outside of and beyond ourselves; a movement towards another source. In our hunger and thirst, we acknowledge our need for something beyond our self-sufficiency and our own productivity.

But what about righteousness, what does that mean?

And, more to the point, whose righteousness is Jesus referring to? If we are hungry and thirsty for this righteousness then it cannot  be something we possess or produce.

To be honest, when I think of the words righteousness or righteous, I can’t help but think of Pixar’s animated classic, Finding Nemo.

For those who haven’t seen Finding Nemo, I would encourage you to do so. It’s a classic. One of the greatest stories ever told!

I’ll try not to ruin the story for you, but at the start of the film, a small clownfish, called Nemo, gets caught in a fishing net and stolen away from his home and his dad. As a result, Nemo’s dad, a clownfish confusingly called Marlin, then sets off in passionate pursuit of his son, crossing an ocean full of danger and strangeness, in order to bring his son home.

Marlin does receive help, though, in his perilous journey. At one point in the film, Marlin meets a green sea turtle, called Crush, and he ends up hitching a ride on Crush’s back as he travels along a fast-moving body of water known as the East Australian Current.

Crush (the green turtle) is a surfer-like character, so, he uses words like Dude, and Awesome, and Whooaa! One of Crush’s favourite words, however, is righteous. As they are travelling down the East Australian Current, Crush is like a surfer on a huge wave, and in the excitement, the thrill and the exhilaration, with all his adrenaline pumping from riding this current, Crush keeps yelling out, ‘righteous, righteoouuusss!’

In Crush’s language, righteous means awesome, amazing, cool and exciting.

That’s not what Jesus is referring to when he uses the word righteous. Although, as we’ll hopefully see this morning, maybe awesome, in its true sense, isn’t far of the mark.

Also, even though Crush’s use of righteous is not the same as Jesus’ use of righteous, Finding Nemo, as a modern story, does help us grapple with the ancient story that Jesus is alluding to in Matthew 5:6, when he uses the word righteous.

Of course, to state the obvious, Jesus isn’t thinking about the story of Finding Nemo. But, in talking to his own people (the people of Israel), Jesus is referring to Israel’s story and its relationship with God.

It’s a long story, spanning centuries. I’m certainly not going to recite it here. But it is the story contained within (what we call) the Old Testament. And in the language of that story, within the history of Israel, the word righteous turns up again and again and again.

In the Greek, the word is dikaiosyne (de-kay-o-zeen)—the same word used in Matthew 5:6. In the original language of the people of Israel, however—the Hebrew language—the word is tsedeq, and it is used, within the Old Testament, to describe, first and foremost, something of the nature of God.

God is righteous.

But what does that mean, exactly?

For some people, it means God is in the right—God is moral and follows the rules. And therefore, when God asks humanity to be righteous, then God is asking us to also be moral and follow the rules.

For other people, the word is speaking about justice, and it’s sometimes translated that way—which is why Matthew 5:6 is sometimes translated as ‘blessed are those who are hungry and thirsty for justice).[i] As such, God’s righteousness is understood as God being a just God—God is an impartial judge who will do what is right.

In a way, there is nothing necessarily wrong with either of those definitions (although, they do raise some interesting questions), but they get nowhere close to the abyssal depths of meaning that the Hebrew word tsedeq carries.

Tsedeq is not a moral word. Tsedeq is not a legal word, either. It is a relational word. In its general sense, tsedeq (righteousness) is about loyalty to a relationship. In the very specific sense of the story of the scriptures, tsedeq (righteousness) has the focused sense of God’s loyalty to the covenant he made with Israel and, further than that, God’s loyalty to creation.

Apologies for the word study. But, I want us to see that when the Bible speaks of God’s righteousness (tsedeq), it is describing how God acts out of commitment to a relationship. And that ‘[g]od does not act randomly, or on a whim, but out of radical covenant loyalty, trustworthiness and faithfulness.’ And so, righteousness is a description of what emerges from the ‘underlying promise-keeping character of God.’ [ii]

In Israel’s story—as described in the Torah, and echoed throughout the Psalms and the Prophets—God makes promises, God forms covenants with people (Adam, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob, the people of Israel, King David etc.). A covenant is not a legal contract. It is a personal relationship—it is the promise of presence, involvement and participation. God marries himself to Humanity. ‘God’s life interacts with the life of the people.’[iii] And God is so faithful to those promises, God is so loyal to these covenants he has made with Israel and others, that even if that covenant ‘has been broken from [the partner’s] side, [or the partner can’t or fails to fulfil it], God will find the way to restore it [and to fulfil it].’[iv] And so, constantly, throughout the Bible, God acts to rescue, to save, to restore, and to bring his people back to himself.

Or, to put that another way, and to jump back to Finding Nemo: Out of a passionate commitment and loyalty, God, like Nemo’s father, Marlin, in Finding Nemo, acts to restore what is lost. God passionately pursues. God is a God who searches because God is faithful.

‘Out of a passionate commitment and loyalty, God, like Nemo’s father, Marlin, in Finding Nemo, acts to restore what is lost. God passionately pursues. God is a God who searches because God is faithful.’

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To quote the theologian, Kenneth Bailey, ‘righteousness is [God’s] acts in history to save.’[v]

NOTHING CAN SEPARATE

In the story of the Bible, if there was a prima example of a display of this divine loyalty, this righteousness of God, then the Exodus story would be it. God’s rescue of Israel from the bondage of the Egypt, the Passover, is the defining act in Israel’s history; it forms the bedrock of their relationship and their understanding of God, and their expectations of God.

God is righteous. God pursues. God is faithful. ‘Even when we are unfaithful, God remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself’, to quote the Apostle Paul (2 Timothy 2:13). Faithfulness is just who God is.

This characteristic of righteousness—of faithfulness, of commitment—is so ingrained in the Bible’s understanding of God, that often to seek after righteousness is to seek God.

For example, in Zephaniah 2:3 (NRSV, Italics mine), we read:

‘Seek the Lord, all you humble of the land,

who do his commands

seek righteousness, seek humility.’

The Old Testament is full of poetry, by the way, and a common feature of Hebrew poetry is something called parallelisms. What this means is that something is said, and then repeated, but in a different way, but they mean the same thing. Therefore, when Zephaniah writes, ‘Seek righteousness’, it is just another way of saying what he said before it, ‘Seek the Lord’.

In Isaiah 51:1 (NRSV, Italics mine);

‘Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness,

you that seek the Lord.’[vi]

Again, in the words of Isaiah, to pursue righteousness, means to seek the Lord.

All that is to say, when Jesus uttered this word in the beatitudes, his audience were not scratching their heads and wondering what Jesus means by it. Israel knew what Jesus was referring to.

When Jesus first spoke these words, hungering and thirsting for God’s righteousness is exactly were Israel found themselves.

Like the word righteous, Israel also understood what Jesus meant by hunger and thirst. The scriptures overflow with those words, too. For example:

Psalm 42:1-2 (NLT), ‘As the deer pants for streams of water, so I long for you, O God. I thirst for God, the living God..’

Psalm 63:1 (NLT), ‘O God, you are my God; I earnestly search for you. My soul thirsts for you; my whole body longs for you in this parched and weary land where there is no water.’

Israel is desperate to experience God’s righteousness, God’s act of salvation. They want rescue from Rome.

Jesus’ promise to them, to those who hunger and thirst, is that they will be satisfied with what God is going to do. Jesus goes onto say, two verses later (Matthew 5:8), more or less the same thing: that if they are pure in heart, they will see God act!

What Jesus’ audience don’t realise at this moment, though, some of them will soon come to realise, is that through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, God’s faithfulness to David, to Israel, to Jacob, to Abraham and Sarah, to Noah and to Adam, is being fulfilled (cf. Matthew 5:17). Through Jesus, God’s righteousness is revealed—God’s saving, restoring, pursuing commitment is seen in the life of Christ. Through Jesus, a new Passover, a new Exodus has transpired that has revealed God’s saving faithfulness (to Israel and to creation, to all of humanity) once and for all.

More on that in a couple of weeks, hopefully.

It’s the revelation of this saving act of God through Jesus’s life, his death on a cross and his resurrection that leads the Apostle Paul, as he thinks about the message of the cross and God’s righteousness, to boldly declare:

‘If God is for us, who can ever be against us? … Can anything separate us from Christ’s love? Does it mean [God] no longer loves us if we have trouble, or calamity, or are persecuted, or are hungry or cold or in danger or threatened with death? … I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from his love. Death can’t, and life can’t. The angels can’t, and the demons can’t. Our fears for today, our worries about tomorrow, and even the powers of hell can’t keep God’s love away. Whether we are high above the sky or in the deepest ocean, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ (Romans 8:31, 35, 38-39, NLT)

God is righteous. God is faithful.

Or, to use St John’s words, God is love (1 John 4:8, 16), and the scope of this unrelenting, searching love, to go back to Finding Nemo’s use of righteous, is truly awesome. It’s huge in scope, and mind-blowing to consider.

GOD WITH US

God actively seeks what is lost. Jesus told a few stories about that (a shepherd seeking a stray sheep, a woman hunting down her lost coin (Luke 15)).

But think about what that says about God.

Some people today, when they think about God, picture some distant onlooker; a far off, apathetic, unconcerned, impersonal being, who is unaffected by us, unmoved.

In the ancient world, God, or the gods, were thought of as uncaring and, in some cases, a source of threat; beings that had to be appeased, appealed to, won over, or calmed down. Humanity was thought to exist on the basis of god’s whims.

But the testimony of the Bible, is the revelation of a God who has intense concern for us. According to Scripture, God is not some apathetic onlooker, but an active participant. God is not immovable and unfeeling, but compassionate. The Bible witnesses to a God who is attentive to and who actively cares for his creatures, a God who seeks to share life with us. The amazing Jewish theologian, Abraham Joshua Heschel, puts it this way, ‘[God] is involved in human history and is affected by human acts. It is a paradox beyond compare that the Eternal God is concerned with what is happening in time.’[vii]

God doesn’t work remotely from his creation. God’s right in the thick of it, in the mess and complexity of it all. God’s Spirit is with us.

Despite what you may think this morning—regardless of what religion, even Christianity, has taught you in the past—God’s attention does not need to be grabbed. God’s love does not need to be won.

‘God’s attention does not need to be grabbed. God’s love does not need to be won.’

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God loves you already. God is already focused on creation. God is passionately committed to us…  to you and to me, and to this world.

Like the parental love of Marlin, in Finding Nemo, God does not need to be shaken out of some slumber or summoned to search, God is already active in searching and restoring. When we cry out for God, when we reach out for God, it is not that God responds to us—God’s outstretched arm was already there, waiting for us to reach out and take a hold of it.

If that is not the case, then God is not righteous.

God is not the uncaring partner in this relationship, or the unconcerned onlooker, or the one who lacks faithfulness. God is not cold towards any of us. In the witness of the Bible, it is actually revealed to be the other way around: it is Humanity that is the uncaring, absent, unfaithful and cold partner—for many reasons (some understandable, others not so).

All God desires is for us to respond to that divine search, and that we would reflect, as God’s image bearers, God’s faithfulness to and God’s concern for the world to the world around us.

BE : AT

Again, when Jesus speaks of righteousness here, he’s not speaking about our righteousness. We can maybe hear this verse as Jesus encouraging us to seek, to desire, to hunger and to thirst towards becoming good and moral people.

Please, don’t misunderstand what I’m saying—it’s certainly not a bad thing for us to seek and work towards being good people. But, Jesus is not talking about us, or our righteousness, here. Jesus is speaking of God’s righteousness, God’s loyalty, God’s active passion to seek and restore humanity.

The only reference to our actions, here, is that we are invited to hunger and thirst for God. We are encouraged to seek the God who seeks. To crave God, as an echo of God’s eternal craving for us.[viii]

‘We are invited to hunger and thirst for God. We are encouraged to seek the God who seeks. To crave God, as an echo of God’s eternal craving for us.’

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Our movements are to be defined by this response to God’s righteousness. God wants to fill us, to satisfy our deepest longing. When we feed on this life from God, it is then that our lives begin to change. Not as a means of attracting God, but as an echo of God’s loyalty to us.

The promise is, if you seek, you will find (Matthew 7:7). Not because God is hiding from us, but because God has always been here and we’re often unaware of it.

I’m reminded of that episode in Jacob’s (Israel’s) life—as he flees one place for another place, as described in Genesis 28. Jacob, resting one night, wakes up to a vision of a ladder, a stairway to heaven, with angels descending and ascending upon it. This vision leads Jacob to declare, ‘God was in this place, and I never knew it’ (Genesis 28:16).

God is always present. God is ever faithful. God is always descending to us.

Blessed are those who seek the God who seeks, because they will find that God is ready and waiting for them, and willing to fill them with his life.

 ‘Is anyone thirsty? Come and drink—even if you have no money! Come and take your choice of wine or milk—it’s all free! … Seek the Lord while you can find him. Call on him while he is near.’

Isaiah 55:1,6 (NLT)

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[i] Because of how some ancient Greek thinkers, like Plato, used the word dikaiosyne, it is sometimes translated as justice. As such, some Bible translators translate Matthew 5:6 as, ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice…’ In some ways, there is nothing wrong with that. It’s a good thing to crave justice. As I shared last time, when we looked at blessed are those who mourn, it’s our craving for justice—for things to be put right—that causes us to lament: to mourn and to hope. Jesus could be encouraging us to desire justice, within this beatitude. However, even though there is an element of that which is certainly true and included in the language of Matthew 5:6, I think Jesus is saying much more than this.

[ii] Quotes taken from N. T. Wright’s 2014 Gore Lecture, Westminster Abbey, March 4, entitled The Faithfulness of God, Then and Now. Wright’s writing is a great place to start if you wish to explore the faithfulness of God—especially its important connection to the word righteousness.

[iii] Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets, The Theology of Pathos, p. 297.

[iv] N. T. Wright, 2014 Gore Lecture, Westminster Abbey, March 4, entitled The Faithfulness of God, Then and Now. Square brackets are mine.

[v] Kenneth Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, p. 81

[vi] Another great example would be Psalm 145:4-7, where God’s mighty saving acts are equated once again to God’s righteousness.

[vii] Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets, The Philosophy of Pathos, p. 333.

[viii] There are a number of implications of this, of course. We could say, that recognising God’s compassionate concern for ourselves should result in recognising that God has that same compassionate concern, and passionate loyalty for others. That God’s compassion towards us becomes our model towards others. ‘We love each other as a result of God loving us first’ (as per, 1 John 4:18).[viii] And so, as Jesus mentions in the very next beatitude, people who hunger and thirst for God’s righteousness are merciful, compassionate people. To squeeze in another quote from Heschel: ‘Biblical religion is not what man does with his [privacy], but rather what man does with God’s concern for all men’  (Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets, p.297)

Additionally, as I have pondered this verse, my mind also turns towards the nature of our worship, and what it means to live a life of worship. Within many modern church settings, in the context of our singing and services, we do have a fixation to be entertained—we want to be attracted and amused. But, as the author Philip Yancey asks it, ‘What would worship look like if we directed it more towards God than towards our own amusement?’ (Philip Yancey, Vanishing Grace, p.186 )