For those whose leaves have withered.

I've working my way through the beatitudes of Jesus as found in Matthew's 5th chapter. I'm up to the 4th beatitude, which is:

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

In previous posts in this series I've mentioned that the first four beatitudes are "beatitudes of lack." A person who fits the description of these first four beatitudes would be feeling keenly his own helplessness (v.3), would be mourning the terrible impact of sin that has touched every life (v.4), would be intensely meek, knowing that he has no spiritual prowess to change a thing about this situation (v.5), and yet would so desire that this situation be changed that it would feel for him like the intense hunger of starvation or the thirst of a man who has been wandering in a desert.

Sometimes I've felt that way. Sort of. Maybe.

Righteousness is the Bible's word for the way the world would be if Adam and Eve hadn't gone tragically astray. It's the word for a kind of life that is entirely and happily alligned with the loving will of God. Sort of like this:

Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.

He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers. Psalm 1:1-3

Wouldn't it be nice? For me, sometimes my leaf withers. And now comes to mind our old friends Eve and Adam, and how they got cast out of all that blessedness, and life became very very hard, and one of their sons murdered the other, and always they got their food by hard labor, dreaming of a garden paradise, and then finally they had another son, Seth, and to Seth was born Enosh. This would be the third generation, then. And Genesis 4:26 says, "At this time people began to call upon the name of the Lord."

Imagine that. It took three generations of suffering for people to begin to call upon God. It took a while, but suffering (that is, the impact of a severe shortage of righteousness) brought forth a hunger for, you guessed it, righteousness.

Today, in my own world, I have seen how a little word, well-intentioned, could ignite a firestorm of recriminations. I might think about the best way to address the situation, and hope to be a help, but I'm learning that the only true response is to call upon the name of the Lord, asking him to work his will. Calling out, in other words, for righteousness.