ὅτι αὐτοὶ χορτασθήσονται.
Compare Ps. 37:19; 132:15; 4QpPsa 3:2–5. Again the future tense is
the eschatological tense and the passive is the ‘divine passive’: ‘Because they
shall, on the last day, be satisfied by God’ In Luke there is no personal
pronoun and the verb is in the second person plural. Precisely how or with what
religious reward the saints will be satisfied is not explicitly stated (cf.
Par. Jer. 9:20). It could be the vision of God, as in Ps 17:15, or the
messianic banquet (cf. Ps 107:1–9; Isa 25:6–8; 49:10–13; 1 En. 62:14; 1QSa; Mt
8:11), or—most probably—a world in which righteousness dwells (cf. Isa 32:1,
16–17; 1 En. 58:4; T. Levi 13:5; 2 Pet 3:13).
Gos. Thom. 69b reads: ‘Blessed are those who hunger, so that the belly
of the one wanting will be filled’. This verse cannot be considered good
evidence of dependence upon Matthew, for it lacks precisely the redactional
traits of 5:6. (‘thirst after righteousness’). Neither is it at all necessary
to see Gos. Thom. 5:6 as a reworking of Lk 6:21a. Indeed, one might even argue
that the version in Thomas is the most primitive, and that ‘the belly of the
one wanting will be satisfied’ was dropped in the presynoptic tradition because
it did not so easily lend itself to a spiritualizing interpretation. (W.
D. Davies and Dale C. Allison Jr., A
Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew,
3 vols. [International Critical Commentary; London: T&T Clark
International, 2004], 1:453-54)
