Daughters of the Leech, or Disciples of Christ?

This blog is a response to Paul Louis Metzger’s post, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”—not those who crave fast food justice. This is the fourth installment in this series on the beatitudes, as we take a look at Matthew 5:6,

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,

                                                                     for they will be filled."

While fast-food metaphors, though appropriate, have become cliché, I would point out that the kingdom speech of Jesus is rarely heard in the "Take Out" lane. The theme song of our consumer spirituality is the classic Veggie Tales’ tongue-in-cheek love song, “My Cheeseburger”.

 

 

Our society of instant gratification conspires against Jesus’ powerful hunger and thirst metaphor. Our children complain, “I’m starving!” when they have gone two hours without a meal, without giving a thought to those who may have gone two days…or two weeks without a full stomach. We in the west have very little insight into what it really means to hunger and thirst. When discussing this in class a classmate pointed out that as Americans, “We don't know hunger...we know appetite.” To which the professor confessed, “I have never been hungry.” To which a prospective student visiting from Uganda could not help but laugh. In many parts of the world, it is inconceivable that someone could live half a century without ever knowing hunger.

In America, some people walk into fast-food restaurants and then walk out because it might take five minutes to order. In fact, my wife and I witnessed it at MOD pizza (a popular super-fast made-to-order pizza restaurant) yesterday. To think that it might take someone 15 minutes in the middle of the lunch rush to not only order but receive their pizza…what an injustice!
So besides being a rant about our appetite-manifested selfishness what is the point of this post? Simply that the quality of our righteousness determines the quality of our justice. Dr. Metzger writes, “Fast food righteousness includes self-righteousness that entails taking matters into our own hands or wishing that others would take matters into their hands on our behalf. It also entails the sense that we are the ultimate decision-makers on what is right and wrong.” Therefore the justice that it metes out, “involves hate and revenge rather than love and mercy. It fixates on getting even with others rather than making things right.” It is here that the voice of conviction reminds me of how we really do love our cheeseburgers! Do we cry out from the poverty of our spirit for the Father’s will to be done, or do we order up another combo plate of self-righteous posturing and blame with a side of denial?

The answer is found in that for which we genuinely hunger. Jesus suggests that the Kingdom disciple is hungry for “righteousness”, but what is that? It is not the proud legalism of the Pharisee that actually looks for what it can get away with. The righteousness the disciple seeks is greater than that, for it is not so much a standard to which we attempt to adhere, as a relationship to which we respond. The true disciple's hunger, their one controlling desire, their burning passion, is to be right with and pleasing to God their loving Savior and King. The cry of the psalmist echoes down through the millennia,

One thing have I asked of the Lord,
       that will I seek after:
       that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
    all the days of my life,
               to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord
        and to inquire    in his temple.

  For he will hide me in his shelter
                                 in the day of trouble;
        he will conceal me under the cover of his tent;
        he will lift me high upon a rock…

You have said, “Seek my face.”
My heart says to you,
    “Your face, Lord, do I seek.” (Psalm 27:4-5, 8)

This passage speaks not so much about living in a cool building as it does about desiring the abiding presence of God in their life. From this relational center, flows a fountain of divine compassion and advocacy that brings the disciple alongside those who bear the burden of a fallen world’s injustice to bring healing. Ezekiel used just such imagery in prophetically describing the effects of kingdom righteousness (47:1-12).

I love what D.A. Carson wrote on this beatitude,  

"These people hunger and thirst, not only that they may be righteous (i.e., that they may wholly do God's will from the heart), but that justice may be done everywhere.  All unrighteousness grieves them and makes them homesick for the new heaven and earth—the home of righteousness (2 Peter 3:13).  Satisfied with neither personal righteousness alone nor social justice alone, they cry for both: in short, they long for the advent of the messianic kingdom.  What they taste now whets their appetites for more."[1]

So what about our hunger? Does it drive us to shamelessly demand so that we might endlessly consume? Do we prove ourselves by our insatiable desires to be the daughters of the leech? I am referring to Proverbs 30:15-16, which says,

A leech on the skin

The leech has two daughters:
    Give and Give.
Three things are never satisfied;
    four never say, “Enough”:
Sheol, the barren womb,
    the land never satisfied with water,
    and the fire that never says, “Enough.”

Or as I would paraphrase it, "two-three-four, greed is never satisfied, it always wants a little more". It seems that Western culture has become very leech-like. In the face of the latest trending self-interest, the timeless and counter-cultural words of the Lord invite us to dwell in the paradox of contentment in what the Father provides for us and the discontentment over what we have provided to others. As weaned children of God (Psalm 131:2), we are learning to wait on him for our daily bread at the same time that he sends us to give others something to eat (Matthew 14:16; Mark 6:37, Luke 9:13). And perhaps, in doing so, we will eat the same food that sustained Jesus so long ago,

So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish

his work. (John 4:33-34)

Will we be seen to be the satisfied disciples of Christ who set their own needs aside in order to share what we have with others? If we, like the psalmist desire the presence of the Lord in our life more than any cheeseburger, we will find it…and then we will naturally share him with others.

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     [1] Frank E. Gaebelein, General Editor, The Expositor's Bible Commentary -- Vol. 8, Zondervan, 1984, p. 134.