Healing from spiritual sickness
We sometimes mistake the pursuit of Gospel truth for a desire to get even with an offender. In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ offers us a sip of living water that brings life back to the soul.
So much information passes through us daily that it can no longer fit in our minds. We scroll endlessly through feeds on our phones, jump from one channel to another, and stumble upon heated arguments in the comments. There, everyone strikes at their opponent with their hard-won sense of being right. Everyone is certain of their own convictions: officials have their reports, random passersby their arguments. We swallow this stream of information from morning till night in the hope of finding solid ground, but the result is just the opposite.
The harder we try to make sense of this avalanche of mutual accusations, the drier and more lifeless we become inside. A feeling of nausea sets in. A person lost at sea who, out of desperation, begins drinking salt water gulps it down eagerly, in great swallows, yet the thirst only grows worse. The salt draws the last traces of moisture from the body's cells. The same is true of us: the problem is not that we have consulted too few sources or failed to understand everything fully. We are simply drinking the wrong water.
A flaw in the Synodal translation
More than anything else, we now crave justice. It is unbearable to watch innocent people suffer, churches be destroyed, and lives shattered, while those responsible for these tragedies continue to live undisturbed. The wounded soul longs for the world to be set right again. We want evil to be called evil, the scales to tip back into balance, and criminals to receive their punishment. This seems to us a perfectly natural desire.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled” – the fourth Beatitude from the Sermon on the Mount. Christ uses a word that, in the Slavic tradition, was translated as "truth" or "justice", although in the biblical context it refers rather to God's merciful righteousness toward humanity.
For a citizen of the ancient world, shaped by Roman law, righteousness or justice was naturally associated with the courtroom, with Lady Justice, who impartially weighs deeds and renders to each according to what is due. It is the logic of restoring balance. But on the lips of the biblical prophets and of the Savior Himself, this word always meant something quite different. It is not about a cold reckoning of debts.
Gospel righteousness is always about the saving mercy of God, who comes not to punish debtors but to mend the torn fabric of relationships.
By habit, we reach for the scales and demand a verdict, while the biblical text gently turns our gaze toward the Physician of souls.
Scripture speaks of the thirst for God's mercy without any softening of its meaning. The ancient word conveys not the mild hunger one feels before a good meal, but the condition of a traveler utterly exhausted after hours of walking over sun-scorched stones, his lips cracked by the heat. The blessing is promised not to those who maintain a detached intellectual interest in righteousness but to those who have reached the very limits of their strength, to the point of collapse.
The trap of flawless justice
In history, there was one case in which earthly justice functioned with absolute perfection: perfect righteousness nailed God to a wooden Cross with nails.
The trial of Christ was not a barbaric lynching by a drunken mob or a bandit raid. It was carried out by a well-oiled state and religious machine. The High Council safeguarded the peace of its people, protecting them from the potential wrath of the Roman legions. Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, acted strictly within imperial regulations, seeking to preserve stability in an occupied province.
Each side was, in its own way, right; each defended law, order, and the security of its citizens. And the result of this authoritative and legally impeccable process was the most terrible verdict in human history.
The next time a sense of our own absolute rightness rises within us, let us pause for a moment and remember where the crowd’s desire to deliver a “just” verdict to God once led.
Why is it dangerous to think of God as a righteous judge?
The ancient ascetics deeply understood the difference between human judgment and Divine truth. St. Isaac the Syrian left a warning: never call God “just” in the sense of strict justice.
He explained it this way: if the Creator were to judge us according to the laws of justice, measuring out to each exactly what their deeds deserve, humanity would have no chance of salvation. But God acts against our primitive arithmetics. He behaves like the strange master in the Gospel parable who pays the workers who came at the eleventh hour the same as those who labored under the scorching sun from early morning. He acts like a father who runs toward the prodigal son, who has squandered the family inheritance, and instead of a harsh rebuke embraces him and orders a feast.
St. Silouan of Athos took this thought to its most painful extreme. Once, a man came to his cell, agitated by news of persecutions against the Church, and asked in indignation how one could love enemies and those who destroy shrines. The elder looked at him with sorrow and replied that a soul capable of wishing eternal fire and retribution upon its tormentors has simply not yet come to truly know God. St. Silouan warned that the moment we begin to demand just punishment for those who have wronged us, Divine grace quietly leaves the room. The elder did not justify those who do evil. He sought to protect the wounded human being from losing what is most essential – inner peace.
By hardening our hearts in response to cruelty, we lose incomparably more than any external enemy could ever take from us.
It is time to stop drinking salt water
The thirst for righteousness of which Christ speaks has little in common with the desire to see a public court trial of one’s offenders. It is a different kind of longing. It is the deep pain of a person who sees that the world around them is dislocated, sick, and broken, and that it cannot be mended by human effort. It is a longing for the Physician, the only One who can heal these wounds. When we demand justice, we are secretly asking for someone’s blood and for the confirmation of our own rightness. When we thirst for Truth, we are asking God for healing.
In the text of the Beatitude, it is crucial to hear not only what was said but also what Christ deliberately left unsaid. The Savior did not call blessed those who, right now, have established perfect order on earth, achieved the triumph of justice, and completely eradicated evil. In our world wounded by sin, such an outcome is unattainable. To promise people easy and swift victories amid catastrophe is simply to lie to them.
Christ blesses precisely this unceasing thirst – the very pain of realizing that everything around us is unfolding as it should not be.
This feeling of emptiness remains a sign that our soul is still alive, that it has not grown accustomed to chaos, has not become one with it, and has not dulled its receptors by drinking salt water from foreign wells.
Of course, this does not mean cowardly giving up, closing our eyes to wrongdoing, or ceasing to defend those who are weak and helpless. Earthly institutions of law and order, and human solidarity, are not thereby abolished. The point concerns the state of our heart when we are left alone with ourselves: sickness and dryness within the soul cannot be quenched by aggressive social media commentary or fleeting political analysis.
We should simply stop drinking salt water, acknowledge our inability to change the course of history, and calmly wait for the sip of true water that was promised to us by God in the Beatitudes.
