God’s Favor Is on Those Desperate for Justice

The sermon on the mount is the Constitution of the Kingdom. God is setting up his Kingdom and here are its laws, its principles, its precepts. The Kingdom has been inaugurated in you and in me through the Holy Spirit. And yet, it is not here in all its fulness.

Theologians call this “inaugurated eschatology.” We do this because we like big words. To inaugurate means to begin or initiate something. Ology is the study of something, in case, the eschaton, which is the Greek word for last. So literally, inaugurated eschatology is the study of the beginning of the end.

When Jesus died and was resurrected, the end began. He rang in the Kingdom of God, the time period when God would dwell with man, by tearing down the veil in the Temple and setting up residence in our hearts. The Kingdom of God is made manifest within us through the Holy Spirit, but it has not broken out into the world as of yet.

It is already, but not yet. Theologian William Manson writes:

The supreme sign of the Eschaton is the Resurrection of Jesus and the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Church. The Resurrection of Jesus is not simply a sign which God has granted in favour of His Son, but is the inauguration, the entrance into history, of the times of the End.

So the promises that God makes here will receive two fulfillments: we will receive them in our hearts in the present and we shall receive them in fullness in the future. The Holy Spirit is a down payment on the Kingdom, it is a promissory note that the Kingdom shall soon appear. It is a reminder to live a Kingdom life even while in the middle of the empires of men.

It is that Kingdom life to which God is calling us in the Beatitudes. This session introduces us the fourth statement in this preamble to the Kingdom Constitution: God’s favor is on those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.

The imagery, of course, is that of longing. Food and water are necessities, not niceties. They are required for life to continue. In a material sense, to be hungry or to be thirsty is to not be blessed because, in that instance, you are in need of something. Something very important. Something necessary to life. This first century world knew of hunger and thirst. It was a daily reality. They knew that, without food and water, the body began to shut down and die.

And the whole time is body is doing this, it is crying out that it needs this food or water to live. The stomach begins to rumble. You feel the dryness in your throat. You began to get weak. Psychologically, you begin to crave and desire food or drink. This isn’t even a conscious decision on your part. It is in innate part of being human. Our body subconsciously physiologically and psychologically begins to do everything it can to convince us that we need to go find food and drink.

Sometimes those cravings aren’t limited to just any food or drink because of the lack of food or drink. All of us here have, at some time or another, gotten a craving for a specific food at a specific time. And you can’t explain it. Sometimes it’s psychological—you see a sign for a certain restaurant and it sticks in your mind. Sometimes it’s because it’s something you eat or drink habitually. But you end up with this innate longing or desire for it.

Three years ago, my family and I moved from the US to the UK and yes, I miss my family and friends, but I also miss the food. There is American food that three years later I literally have dreams of eating. That’s what Jesus is saying righteousness should be like for us.

God has put eternity in our hearts and we have an inconsolable longing, for righteousness and justice. We try to satisfy it with vacations, with movies, with sexuality, with sports, with drugs and alcohol, with workplace success. The list goes on.

To quote C.S. Lewis:

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

That’s what Jesus is talking about when he says we should hunger and thirst after righteousness. It’s supposed to be an insatiable craving for what is right—not just in our own lives, but in the world at large. And we have this craving because we not created for this world. We were created for a world of righteousness. We were created for a world of justice.

The pattern we see building in the Beatitudes—that God’s favor is on the poor in Spirit, the mourning, the oppressed, and those who long for justice—is one of God calling people out of oppressive empire to live in the liberty of God’s kingdom community. And that Kingdom community isn’t just for the next life. It’s for now. We may not have it in all fulness, but we are called to hunger, to thirst for righteousness and justice—and then to go out and be ambassadors of God’s kingdom community to enact that justice.

Social justice is not a liberal agenda, it is Christ-centered mandate. There is a national responsibility on behalf of the follower of God to live out God’s ideals both privately and publicly. If Christ calls us to do it personally, then he also calls the people of God to do it corporately. To hunger and thirst after justice means to stand up against all of the various injustices we see. To say that Black Lives Matter. To affirm the right of the Palestinian people to exist. To protect sexual and gender minorities. To care for creation. To advocate for a living wage. And the list goes on.

The late Ron Sider, one of my theological heroes and mentors, wrote this:

We must talk, pray, debate, and read the word together until biblical social concern is an integral part of our evangelism and the proclamation of forgiveness through the Cross is integral to our prophetic social criticism. Only then can we faithfully proclaim the whole Gospel for the whole man.

The whole Gospel for the whole person includes not just forgiveness through the cross, but a deep concern for justice in the here and now. That’s the heart of the Spirit-led community that Jesus is building in the Sermon on the Mount. Hunger for righteousness, thirst for justice. Unveil a bit more of the kingdom of God amid the empires of men. God’s favor is on those desperate for justice—who long for a perfect righteousness, for they will be filled.