Righteousness ...

Righteous. Now there is a word that can kick your butt early in the morning. I’ve heard it used to describe everything from a good person to a guitar lick to sect-approved behavior to a “Bogarted” joint. Seems like beauty is in the ear of the listener.

It seems understandable, then, that the writer Matthew used it, in some form, for the words of the Galilean while preaching on the Mount. He said, in the fourth of his so-called “Beatitudes:

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” (ESV, Matthew 5:6).

In some religious congregations, you are declared righteous because you have had your sins cleansed by Jesus.

In others, it means you are capable of sublime actions, as when the modern Jews proclaimed Oskar Schindler a “Righteous Person” for being credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his enamelware and ammunition factories in occupied Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Yeah. That makes sense.

On the other hand, there are people like Franklin Graham who seek righteousness by preaching hatred against those whom the process of natural selection made different. So it’s a slippery word at best, this “righteousness.” Who knows how the Galilean would have interpreted it? It’s my guess that it would have been a lot closer to Schindler than to Graham. That’s just my opinion.

Perhaps the more understandable words, though, are “hunger and thirst.” The Galilean didn’t make it easy. I’ve been lucky in my life. I’ve only hungered and thirsted for short periods unless you discount high school, and … well let’s leave that topic for, as H.L. Mencken put it, “future biographers.”

Once, though, I hungered and thirsted pretty darned bad. That was during SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training provided at no cost to me by the United States government. They took us outside Warner Springs, CA to that desert where, if you remember your grade school geography films, you can fry an egg on a rock at high noon and freeze water in a glass overnight. They starved us for several days in that dreadful environment. They also drove us into a fake prisoner-of-war camp and beat the crap out of us, but that is a story for another day.

The point is: by the time they brought us back, I had commenced to hunger and thirst most righteously.

I think that was the sort of state the Galilean advocated for those who seek righteousness. You have to put yourself in a state of high-hankering.

And I don’t care what Franklin Graham says, I don’t think a person can reach that state in a Manhattan skyscraper on a full stomach.

The Dark Side of Righteousness.