The Fourth Door: Hungering for What Is True
Beatitude
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” Matthew 5:6
Exposition
As we step through the fourth door of the Kingdom, the language of the Beatitudes turns decisively toward desire. Poverty of spirit named our dependence. Mourning taught us how consolation is received. Now Christ asks something more searching: what do you actually want?
Matthew’s choice of words is deliberate. Hunger and thirst are not metaphors for polite interest or moral aspiration. They name a bodily urgency, a need without which life cannot continue. This Beatitude therefore describes not a rule to be followed but a longing that orders everything else.
Here Matthew’s theology is essential. As Peter Ellis demonstrates in Matthew: His Mind and His Message, righteousness in this Gospel is never merely private moral correctness. It names fidelity to God’s will as revealed and embodied by Jesus, especially within the Sermon on the Mount. The Beatitudes function programmatically. They establish the interior orientation of the disciple before Jesus unfolds specific commands. To hunger for righteousness is to desire a life brought into living conformity with God’s reign, verified not by intention alone but by hearing and doing the word Matthew 7:24–27.
This is why Matthew repeatedly pairs righteousness with obedience. Not everyone who calls Jesus “Lord” enters the Kingdom, but the one who does the will of the Father Matthew 7:21. Desire, in Matthew, must become enacted truth.
The Catechism receives this teaching ecclesially. The Beatitudes “depict the countenance of Jesus Christ and portray his charity” and they “express the vocation of the faithful” by revealing the desires that must be purified and reordered §1717. Hungering for righteousness, then, is not self-driven striving. It is consent to let God reshape what we love so that our desires mirror Christ’s own.
Jacques Philippe stands firmly within this tradition. He insists that this Beatitude is first about conversion, not activism. Before we seek justice outside ourselves, we must allow truth to penetrate illusion within us. Philippe notes that we often want righteousness abstractly while resisting the truth that would reorder our own hearts. The hunger Christ blesses is a hunger to be made right, to be freed from self-deception, and to let God establish His order within us.
And yet the promise is gentle. “They shall be satisfied.” This is not total fulfillment here and now, but sufficiency. God gives enough light for the next step, enough grace for fidelity today. Philippe emphasizes that God feeds desire gradually, deepening it rather than exhausting it, so that the soul learns to live from truth rather than control.
This door teaches us that holiness begins not with answers, but with an honest hunger, a refusal to settle for substitutes, and a willingness to let God name what is lacking.
Exhortation
During Lent, this Beatitude invites us to examine what we truly hunger for, not what we say we want, but what our time, attention, and emotional energy reveal. God does not shame disordered desire. He heals it. But only if we allow the truth to surface.
Action Item
This week, set aside one quiet moment and ask God a single question without explanation or defense: What do You want me to desire more purely? Do not rush to resolve it. Let the hunger be named.
Hunger & thirst, natural order. Good things and bad things to hunger & thirst. Body reaps consequence, cirrhosis liver, obesity, if wrongly ordered.
Like a good parent, train to their hunger and thirst to good things. He tells us to hunger for righteousness. If we seek that, we will be satisfied. It’s enough to engage appetite for rightly ordered spiritual life. Many people long for exterior righteousness to themselves, but do not correct disorder within. Intellect either controls or is subservient to appetite. If we do not righteous and cirrhosis liver seek I tout first, train ourselves to now find. Worse can’t control interior will need exterior control and demand it.
As this door closes, desire has been clarified but not yet disciplined. The next door will ask what happens when that desire is placed under gentleness, when strength is no longer asserted but surrendered.
Next episode we can open The Fifth Door: Meekness, where Matthew’s vision of kingship and Philippe’s teaching on surrendered strength meet beautifully.