Working on the Beatitudes tapestry for a while today. This will consist of nine miniature panels expressing the promise and the paradox of the Kingdom of God. While I stitch I think, imagine, listen to music, and pray the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer:”Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The coming of the kingdom of God, and the fulfilment of the promises of the Beatitudes will, in God’s time, coincide.
“Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for right to prevail; they shall be satisfied.” (REB)
This translation seems to capture the urgency of ache and longing for the very things that make for life; such as food and drink, justice and righteousness. This saying of Jesus was first articulated in a conquered and occupied country, under the shadow of a superpower with overwhelming military capability, and by someone who would one day stand before a Roman court and Governor, when right would not prevail.
Except. Our human longing for right to prevail, for justice to become a torrent of righteousness, is exactly what Jesus came to fulfil, and to fully satisfy. But God’s righteousness and justice are not established by force that violates. The Kingdom of God is of a different order – “My kingdom is not of this world,” said Jesus to Pilate, the face and force of Empire, combining political cunning with lethal power.
That promise, so apparently unrealistic, is nevertheless a fertile seedbed of hope – they (and we) shall be satisfied. On God’s say so, and in God’s way. That promise of righteousness and justice was said finally and definitively by the very same Jesus who spoke those words, and whose death and resurrection made such an outcome certain: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself…”
All of the Beatitudes have this eschatological trajectory, looking forward to God’s full restoration of a new creation. Meanwhile we hunger and thirst, we pray and we wait, we work and bear witness towards all that anticipates that great righting of wrong. Our resistance of evil is part of that same process of faithful waiting and hopeful action.
The Beatitudes tapestry is slow meticulous work. Each stitch is a small protest at the disorder of the world, the slow building of meaning and imagination, and enacted longing for the healing of the wounds of the world. In that sense hunger and thirst for righteousness, and for justice.
Photograph of the River Dee, near Braemar.
Leave a Reply