Matthew 5.6

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled."
For me this appears to be more straightforward to interpret than the previous three beatitudes. Hungering and thirsting are straightforward metaphors for strongly desiring using the experience of fasting or want as the source domain and spiritual desire for God as the target. And the metaphor continues; taking the idea of being filled with food into the domain of spiritual desire.
There is of course the incongruity of calling those who experience want as being blessed/lucky and there is the question of when they will be filled: is this an fulfilment-of-the-Times promise or something that is meant to be this worldly? Or something of both? CLearly the luckiness/blessedness of wanting rightness-with-God is that this is a desire that God wants to fulfill, and I relate this to St.Augustine of Hippo writing in Confessions, book one, "O God you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you".
What does it mean to hunger and thirst for righteousness. I guess that it is saying 'God is to die for' and meaning it; it suggests a desperate desire for God that,like hunger and thirst, makes it hard for someone to think of anything else and tends to turn all their actions towards keeping open the possibility of sating the hunger or slaking the thirst.

All of which makes me think that perhaps the being filled is both now and not-yet. The description I have just written of what I think the metaphors suggest, puts me in mind of the way that life often is for a Christian: an experience of finding thoughts of God turning up in everyday life of desiring to turn all of life into communion with God and also finding there are times when the communion is experienced and yet there are times when the desire is present without apparantly being fulfilled. I guess if we're honest there are also times when the appetite seems to have gone or we have found ways to drown it out and even to distract ourselves from it.

It seems to me also that it is important to note that the implication of this teaching of Christ is that desire is not wrong. SOme Christian teaching seems to look on desire as of the devil or the Fall. It clearly is not; in God's economy desire is there to draw us into communion with God and with other people and indeed with the world God has made. It is the distortion of desire into greed, self-aggrandisement, exploitation, self-abnegation and so on that is the problem. It is when we desire a piece of fruit in contrariness to the will of God that the trouble sets in...