November 2006

In everyday language, we find the word “justice” applied when referring to respect for human rights, the desire for equality, the equitable distribution of the world’s resources, the institutions that exist to uphold the law.
Is this the justice that Jesus speaks about in the Sermon on the Mount, where he explains the beatitudes? Yes, but it comes as a consequence of a more comprehensive justice that has to do with harmonious relationships, with concord, with peace.
Hunger and thirst remind us of the basic needs of each person; they symbolize that profound yearning of the human heart that is never fully satisfied. According to Luke’s Gospel, Jesus simply had said: “Blessed are you who are now hungry” (Lk 6:21). Matthew explained that the hunger of a human person is a hunger for God, the only one who can fully satisfy it. Saint Augustine understood this well; on the very first page of his Confessions he wrote this famous sentence: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
Jesus himself said: “Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink” (Jn 7:37). He, in turn, nourished himself on the will of God: “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me” (Jn 4:34).
Justice, in the biblical sense of the word means, therefore, to live in conformity with the plan God has for humanity, which he envisioned and wished to be a family united in love.

«Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied»

The desire and the quest for justice have always been carved in the person’s conscience. God himself placed them in the human heart. But despite the conquests and the progress made in the course of history, we are still a long way from seeing the accomplishment of God’s plans. The wars that are being fought even in our day, as well as the terrorism and the ethnic conflicts, are signs of social and economic inequality, of injustice, and of hate.
The obstacles to world harmony are not only of a juridical nature, that is, due to a lack of laws to govern our common living. The obstacles come from deeper moral and spiritual attitudes, from how we value the human person, from how we treat each other.

The same holds true for the economic order. The widespread under-development and the growing gap between rich and poor, with the unequal distribution of goods, are not merely the result of faulty systems of production; they come first and foremost from cultural and political choices. These are basic facts.
When Jesus invites us to give also our cloak to the one who asks for our tunic, or to go the extra mile with whoever asks us to go one mile (see Mt 5:40-41), he indicates “something more,” an even “greater justice” that goes beyond that of legal practice, a justice that is an expression of love.
Without love, without respect for human persons and attention to their needs, our personal relationships might seem quite appropriate, but they might also become so bureaucratic that they cannot provide satisfying responses to people’s real needs. Without love, we will never attain true justice, a sharing of goods among rich and poor, an attentiveness to the uniqueness of each man and woman and to the concrete situations in which they find themselves. Goods cannot move from one place to another on their own: people’s hearts must be moved and made to move the goods.

«Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied»

How should we live this Word of Life?
By appreciating each of our neighbors for what he or she really is: not only as a human being with his or her rights and basic equality with everyone else, but as a person who is the living image of Jesus.
We must love our neighbors even if they are our enemies, with the same love that the Father has for them, to be ready to make sacrifices for them, even the greatest one: “To give one’s life for one’s friends” (John Paul II, Sollecitudo rei socialis, 40).
This means to live with them in mutual giving, sharing our spiritual and material goods, so that all will become one family.
Then our yearning for a united and just world, as God has envisioned it, will become a reality. He himself will come to dwell in our midst and he will satisfy us with his presence.

«Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied»

A man who works in an office told us how he almost lost his job. “The firm that I worked for recently merged with another similar firm. After the merger, the managers asked me to examine our list of employees because with the restructuring of the new company three of them would have to be let go.
This whole proceeding did not seem well thought out to me. It looked like a rather rushed decision that failed to consider the consequences it would have on the three people and on their families. What was I to do? Then I remembered the Word of Life. The only thing to do was what Jesus would have done: to take the initiative in loving. I handed in my resignation and explained to the managers that I could not sign the papers to lay-off those three employees.
My resignation, however, was not accepted. In fact, the managers then asked me how I would go about finding places for these employees in the new organization. I had already worked out a new personnel plan, a plan that offered an easy and useful way of inserting all these employees into different departments. They accepted my plan and we all kept our jobs.”

Chiara Lubich