I can’t get no satisfaction
The Third Sunday of Lent, 11.00am Sung Eucharist, 20 March 2022
Our first reading this morning, from the prophet Isaiah, is about different kinds of hunger and thirst. It emerged out of a context that the people of Ukraine would recognise, for Israel had been invaded by a foreign power who had reaped devastating destruction. Many of the people of Israel, like Ukrainian refugees, ended up in exile, and they hungered for home. They longed with all their hearts to return to their homes and livelihoods.
But the reading from Isaiah chapter 55 marks a transition into a different kind of hunger. Because Israel did get to go home, and did get to return to the Promised Land. Jerusalem was restored, the Temple rebuilt, the walls raised again – as surely, we pray they will be in Ukraine. But when all that was done, Israel was still hungry.
“Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy?” These are the resonant words of Isaiah to Israel. It’s a question that evokes the difference between the kind of hunger that has a name – I want to go home; I want peace – and a different kind of hunger that is harder to pin down and describe.
So two kinds of hunger: first, the hunger that has a name. It’s a hunger where you know what you want but you haven’t got it: when you interviewed for a job, and you can’t understand why they didn’t appoint you; where you’re dying for something to eat, but the cupboard’s bare; when you just want something, something in your life to go right for a change, but people keep letting you down. Such hunger can become all-consuming, transforming your relationships, your ways of thinking, your whole character. We are what we eat, it is said. We are also shaped by what we hunger for.
But there’s another kind of hunger. It’s a hunger that lingers deep in the bottom of your soul, but it doesn’t have a name. St Augustine of Hippo described it in terms of the deep restlessness of the human heart. In one of their most memorable songs, the Rolling Stones sang, ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’. Memorable, perhaps, nearly sixty years after its release, because it identifies a point deep in the gut where hunger lingers, the hunger that doesn’t have a name, the restless, yearning, aching hunger that knows it hasn’t yet found what it’s looking for.
Twenty years before ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’, the psychologist Abraham Maslow offered an explanation for the different kinds of human hunger. Maslow described a hierarchy of human needs. He made the point that we can’t really engage with higher matters until our basic physiological needs are met. Above our physiological needs are our safety needs, and above those are our belonging needs; next come our esteem needs, and finally what he called ‘self-actualisation’.
The trouble is, even if we’ve never experienced near starvation, or invaders on our streets, we can more or less all express vividly what the first kind of hunger feels like. But the second kind of hunger – that’s more difficult. How do you describe what it feels like to realise you still haven’t found what you’re looking for?
A week before the Oscars, I hope you will allow me to explore this deep longing and hunger via a 2004 French film, The Chorus, which was nominated in that year for best International Film. It is one of those ‘inspirational teacher’ films, but a pretty good one. Set in south-east France in 1949, the setting is a special school for out-of-control boys An new music teacher, Clément Mathieu, arrives to replace a teacher who’s leaving because he’s been hurt by a pupil. The headmaster’s regime is simple: he seeks control through fear, giving the boys enough food to keep them healthy and strict discipline to keep them compliant. Clement faces a high level of hostility, and his more lenient policy on punishment brings him into conflict with the head.
But the story really begins when Clement decides to teach the children to sing. Most of the boys play along because it’s less demanding than the regular curriculum. The one boy, Pierre, who keeps aloof is the wildest of them all. But after Clement win’s Pierre’s trust, it becomes apparent he has an astounding treble voice, worthy of Portsmouth Cathedral choir. Gradually, despite the headteacher’s increasing anxiety and envy, the chorus of boys grows in skill and confidence, performing to the local countess.
But it cannot last. Part of the school burns down due to arson, and Clement is held responsible and fired. But then you see two men, fifty years later, leafing through the scrapbook Clement kept about his time at the school. And you remember the film started with a 62-year-old orchestral conductor at the height of his powers performing a Strauss waltz. And you realise this is that same man, and that same man is called Pierre, and he was the tearaway delinquent who became the treble soloist, and is now the living embodiment that Clement’s work was not in vain, but brought forth a hundredfold.
The Chorus is about the same distinction between the hunger that has a name and the hunger that has no name. The boys know all about the first kind of hunger. They want food, they want some control over their lives, they want exercise, they want to make misery for anyone who tries to pin them down. But the real drama of the story is about the second kind of hunger. The boys are very, very angry. But most of them aren’t exactly sure what they’re angry about or who they’re angry with. They’re hungry, but food and exercise cannot fully meet their hunger. The crucial point is that Clement doesn’t give the boys what they think they want. He takes a huge gamble on reaching them in the hunger that they don’t have a name for. And that’s where the film becomes more than a heart-warming story and turns into an important analogy for Christian mission.
We often think of practical Christianity as striving to meet people’s hunger – the hunger that has a name: for the starving food, for the thirsty water, for those invaded by an oppressive power – peace with justice. All of which is good and right and true, and today’s collection of essential goods for Ukraine is a really important thing.
But for the people of Ukraine, and those in need in Portsmouth, and for all of us, there is still the need for more. Christianity isn’t simply about satisfying people’s hunger, although of course it is about that. For, says Jesus in the wilderness, humankind does not live on bread alone. At the heart of Christianity is this powerful insight that we are all hungry for something we don’t know the name of. That there is something even deeper, even more long-lasting, and even more insatiable than our named hungers.
And that is God’s hunger for us, for our transformation and fruitfulness. ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts,’ we’re told in Isaiah chapter 55. God’s hunger is greater than ours, and it is for you and for me and for all of us together. As our Gospel reading reminded us, God wants to turn to him, and bear fruit, and flourish. And discovering that is for us like discovering choral music was for the boys in that special school. For some of us, like Pierre, it unearths a gift that was longing to get out. For others, it’s a realisation that together we can make something beautiful we could never make alone, that there’s a place for all shapes and sizes and voices and energies in a song that comes from the heart of the divine. Come, says the prophet Isaiah, ‘and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.’ ‘Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.’ It’s free but not cheap – it’s priceless but for everybody. If we are hungry – deeply, deeply hungry, we are invited to hear the good news, the news we’ve been waiting all this time for: God longs for us, and only in God, as Augustine wrote, will our restless hearts be satisfied. Amen.