Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: For they shall be filled.
“I asked for bread: God gave
A stone instead.
Yet while I pillowed there my
Weary head,
The angels made a ladder
of my dreams,
Which upward to celestial
Mountains led.
And when I woke, beneath
The morning’s beams,
Around my resting place fresh
Manna lay;
And, praising God, I went upon
My way.
For I was fed.”
We would probably say, at first thought, that the satisfied are the happy, that those who have no desire unfulfilled are the blessed. We do not think of intense and painful hunger as a desirable state. Yet the Lord pronounces one of His beatitudes upon the unsatisfied, those who hunger and thirst.
However, it is not in the condition of hunger, itself, that the blessedness lies, but in that of which hunger is the sign and that to which it leads. It is the token of life and health. A dead man has no desire, no longing for anything. One who has no craving for that which is good, no thirst for God, no yearning to be holy, to be like Christ, to be filled with the Spirit, is dead.
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