Grace and Peace dear friends who are living out their Belovedness and Offering their Belovedness to a World in Crisis!
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be filled.” (NIV)
This is a beatitude that builds on the previous three, so if you’re new to the post, I’d encourage you to stop. Go back and read the previous three posts. That’s important.
When we’ve become poor and at the end of our rope; when we mourn and are awakened to some of what we’ve truly lost in these days; and when we live in the new economy of meekness rather than power, prestige and position; then and only then are we really able to say, with reasonable certainty, of what can really satisfy us. This is important to realize. There is an order to how God moves in the Kingdom. There is a progression of decent and downward mobilization. The Beatitudes point for a lower posture than we have ever thought imaginable. What once seemed great is now, not great. It’s taken a pandemic to invite us to think another way. What once seemed the right way to do life, suddenly becomes the wrong way to do life. It’s taken a global crisis to force us to think different. What once seemed normal is now disintegrating right before our eyes and we have not yet found the new normal. But we have a strong hint this many days into our pandemic. The new normal is a new economy; a new order of how to do life and relationships; a new way of valuing the values of the Kingdom.
This is where we can now begin to ponder what are we really hungry and thirsty for after we’ve been brought low; after we’ve now faced our poverty and after we are finding ourselves in 21st century sackcloth and ashes.
Jeremiah spoke about this 800 years before Jesus was born. He said, “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water and have dug their own cisterns –broken cisterns that cannot hold water” (Jeremiah 2:13). We, the same people today, have “forsaken” the spring of living water—meaning that which is really good, pure and life giving water. Then we have stockpiled what we thought was good water and now it is equivalent to broken cisterns. We have hoarded the wrong things all together. We now know that we were mistaken—that we were wrong.
Jesus offers the Kingdom alternative and the antidote to spiritual thirst and heart felt longings that we are craving. Jesus says it bluntly. We are intended to thirst for Kingdom streams and Living Water that is not manufactured by humans.
In these days of quarantine do you, like me, find yourself thirsting for some of our old ways—ways that as we sit with the Beatitudes might now be called “broken cisterns” of ways we were so wrong in our thinking?
Thirsting for righteousness is not in our vocabulary so much—until these darker days of being brought low—perhaps now, even lower then even yesterday. But seeking “righteousness” is what Jesus told us to do in Matthew 6:33, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness…” How could we have forgotten what we now learning through our broken cisterns that we knew—all along we should have done? IT happens. We are not the first to have hoarded cisterns that can’t hold what really satisfies the soul. That’s why we can change our ways and live more lowly and find the spring of water that is here—within each one of us to drink.
The Spring of Water—this source of “righteousness”— is not an external fountain. This fountain is really within us. Again, Jesus is clear about where the source of the water is in John 7:38, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink…streams of living water will flow from within him.” The Stream is within. The stream is not attached to church attendance. The streams are not tied to a place or a GPS. The streams we’ve been looking for all along are within you and within me.
This is what being alone and moving through loneliness into solitude offers us. This is the right way to live life. It is a part of living righteous.
To thirst for righteousness is to thirst for God. Christ alone. While we now are plainly seeing that our cisterns that we assumed could sustain us simply will not, we can now drink from God who is within us.
The question is not “Where is God in this pandemic?” For now, we are seeing a deeper awareness and it is this-- God is in you. That’s precisely where God is. He’s been there all along. The Stream is within. What has been missing is the awareness. This is a righteous awakening my dear friends. This awareness is a long, cool, drink that we have needed for so, so long.
To hunger and thirst for righteousness is to ponder all the vain things that use to satisfy us; to consider, if not list, the many broken cisterns that we have drunk from that we are now truly sorry about.
To hunger and thirst for righteousness is finally to be able to understand what Paul calls, “the secret of contentment.” Paul wrote a letter, while in a forced quarantine of a prison cell—which sometimes, my own study can feel like these days if I’m honest with you in our state’s “Shelter in Place and Stay at Home” confinement law which takes place today in North Carolina.
Paul said: “I have learned to be content (Jesus’ word was ‘satisfied in our beatitude this day) whatever the circumstances. I know what is its to be in need and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content to any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry (Was Paul thinking of our beatitude when he wrote these very words in his house quarantine?) I can do everything through him who give me strength. (Philippians 4:11-13).
We can be confident that Paul learned the secret by anchoring himself to the very words of Jesus in this very important—if not, all important Beatitude for us this very day.
Drink deep my beloved friends and all will be well!
Stephen W. Smith
Contemplative Question: What broken cistern comes to mind as you sit among the broken cistern pieces today?