SOTM 6: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Righteousness

6Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
-Mt. 5:6

I want to be happy. Ultimately, that might be all I really care about. You might be the same. It's written in our official documents-- life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If there were a drug that would forever make me happy I might try it. Many of us do. There are all kinds of drugs: sex, stuff, power, religion, and of course drugs. Marx says that religion is the opium of the masses. I think he might be right. Some of us hunger after worship "experiences" in ways not dissimilar to how some hunger to get high. But increasingly in our Post-Christian world I don't think that religion is still the drug of choice for most of us. Sex, stuff, and power seem to be quite enough. Oh yeah, and drugs.

But none of it is working.

It isn't working because Marx is right. It's just a drug. And sometimes drugs are good for alleviating the pain but they don't do anything to fix the problem. If my leg has been cut off, it doesn't matter how much Tylenol I take. When I've finished the bottle I'll still have to hop to the store to get more.

Let's explain the analogy. Drugs are circumstances. The pursuit of power, sex, stuff, and religion is all the pursuit to arrange circumstances in such a way as to make us happy. But what Jesus is showing us is that the problem isn't with our circumstances, the problem is with us. This basic insight concerning the fundamental human predicament is something which Jesus brought afresh to our world. It is why Augustine's "Confessions" is recognized by many as the first true autobiography. No one before had seen the necessity of looking so deep within. (As the "Confessions" teaches, the path to God is to look inward and this will direct us upward. The unfortunate turn of Western Civilization has been that we've only followed Augustine up the first step--and not even that with both feet. We've turned our attention entirely on ourselves but have not discovered our problem and certainly haven't found our way to God. Rather we've just poured more fuel on the fire of narcissism.) But when we discover that the problem isn't with circumstances but with ourselves we are in a position to find happiness after all.

So Jesus says "blessed" or "happy" are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Happy are those who know the problem is with themselves and seek to correct it. For those of us familiar with Christian lingo, the righteousness in question involves both justification and sanctification as well. Happy are those who first of all know that God loves them--that he has done what is necessary to secure our relationship with Him--and secondly desire to be like Him. Do you want to be like God? Do you want to be a good person? Because becoming one is also how one becomes happy. (We all know this. Mean and nasty people are usually not very happy.) Jesus is inviting us to follow him and shows us how. It's time to change the books to life, liberty, and the pursuit of righteousness.