NOTES for Luk 6:21
"Blessed are you who hunger, for you shall be satisfied," says the evangelist Luke. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied," says the evangelist Matthew (Matt 5:6). These two texts have completely different meanings, despite the fact that, by all appearances, they originate from one source. And this produces bewilderment and unease in the rational consciousness. But let us see whether it is truly so terrible.
We all remember well the prayer of the second antiphon, taken from Psalm 145: "His hope is in the Lord his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, who keeps truth forever, who executes judgment for the wronged, who gives food to the hungry." But in fact there, in Psalm 145, there is a more concrete word than "food"; the word there is bread, panem, a circumstance also reflected in the Synodal translation. So it is bread that the Lord gives to the hungry.
The word "bread" occurs a huge number of times in the Bible and is understood in most cases in the most ordinary sense. Therefore the translation "food" given by the Church Slavonic Bible may not change anything essential. But one can look at it from another side as well. "Give us this day our supersubstantial bread..." - supersubstantial, such would be the translation exactly corresponding to the Latin "supersubstantialem": super means above, substantia means essence (the above-mentioned circumstance of the lost letter is noted, for example, in the book by the well-known Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin, "Axioms of Religious Life"). Thus the bread of Psalm 145, which the Lord gives to the hungry, can be understood in the light of the New Testament as supersubstantial bread. And what is supersubstantial bread if not righteousness?