This following article speaks for itself.
Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.
Jesus (Luke 6: 20B-21A)
“Jesus knew the pain of hunger and the healing possibilities in meals. Therefore, Jesus not only preached, taught, and healed; he also fed, saying, ‘I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.’ He promised his disciples at the opening of his ministry that he would confront the hunger of the world.
Some people have mistakenly inferred that Matthew has somehow spiritualized the beatitudes with the additions of ‘poor in spirit’ and ‘hunger and thirst for righteousness’. This interpretation fails to do justice either to Jewish concepts of the person or to the nature of poverty and hunger. No first-century Jew would understand our division of body and spirit. A person’s body and person’s soul are part of a unified personality. What affects the body affects the soul and vice versa. We know this from our own experience. To be hungry in your stomach is to hunger in one’s spirit. To be poor is not simply an abstracted condition of the heart or the head but is a condition which affects one’s total well-being. Chronic poverty is known to have a wide array of detrimental emotional consequences.
Thus, it would be a perversion of this passage to argue (as, alas, the church has sometimes argued) that it was not real hunger or actual material poverty to which Jesus was speaking, but rather some inner, ethereal, or spiritual condition. It is just this spiritualized attitude which makes our worship an escape from God’s will rather than a confrontation with God’s will.
Nicolas Berdyaev, the Russian theologian, once said that to consider our own bread is a materialistic question; however, our neighbours’ bread is a spiritual question. How tragic it is that for many people the word spiritual has come to mean ‘not real’!
The words, ‘Blessed are the hungry,’ were spoken to a people for who poverty was a pervasive reality. Famine and the accompanying slow, agonizing death by starvation were ever-present possibilities. These words were heard by people, who knew that while humanity ‘does not live by bread alone’, we do not live without bread either.
And it was to this poverty of body and soul, this hunger of extruding bellies and skin-and-bones deprivation that Jesus’ words thundered forth, “Blessed are the poor…Blessed are the hungry…”.
In the time it takes for you to read these words, somewhere in the world, someone has closed his or her eyes and died of hunger.
From Sunday Dinner, by William Willimon, (Pg 60-63)