blessed are the satisfied

For many, the end of hunger is food. If we can only put bread in empty mouths want will cease. Even Christians have succumbed to this myth, mobilizing for social action and reform, meeting physical needs before (and sometimes in place of) spiritual needs.

Christ's Gospel is very different. He offers the end of hunger in Himself, His body as bread for those willing to accept such strange fare, His blood pure wine for the parched.

His whole self a complete feast for those invited to His wedding.

How do we manage to get such a simple concept wrong? Too many times I've heard the most famous Beatitude turned into "blessed are the hungry," leaving the true depths of Jesus' statement unplumbed, the gravity and the joy of "blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled." The emptiness of the misquote is fear-black; but the filling of the righteousness-starved is a beautiful mystery.

We do not partake of Christ because we're desolate and need to be filled; we come to the Table because we're already full of Him. We come because we want to be like Him. We come because our desires are captive, our wills hostage in His hands, because He leads us there and commands us to eat and drink, to satisfy our hunger in true manna and new wine.

Christ demands of us nothing short of perfection, and that perfection is Himself. Our desire to conform to His likeness gives us no option but to slake ourselves on Him, to become like Him through steady consumption and digestion of the Word of God.

If we belong to God, we are fed. It's not a single meal as some suggest; it's a continual, neverending, unabating banquet on the Lord Jesus Christ who is without end and without death and who will continue to present Himself to us for our sustenance and nourishment through all the endless days of eternity. How can we turn from His body and His blood? How can we stop devouring the God of our days, who changes our countenance by easy stages the more we delight only in Him?

Christians, we cannot. If God is our God, righteousness is our food, and there is none righteous but Christ alone. In Jesus' name, let our hunger never cease, and our appetites never falter.