They Do Not Hunger Politely

Fifth Sunday of Easter — 1 Peter 2:2–10

Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation [1 Peter 2:2].

For the past several weeks, the Epistle readings appointed for the Easter season have come from the same letter, 1 Peter — written to communities of Christian believers scattered across Asia Minor, men and women living as what Peter calls “aliens and exiles” in a world that does not share their allegiances. The letter opens in a register of sustained doxology: living hope, imperishable inheritance, a faith more precious than gold. It is elevated language, and it is meant to be — Peter is reminding people who have paid a real price for what they believe that what they hold is worth the cost.

And then, just as the theological register reaches its height, Peter says: be like a newborn.

Not a soldier. Not a pilgrim making steady progress toward a destination. Not even a disciple, with all the dignity that word implies. A newborn. An infant who cannot feed itself, protect itself, or account for its own existence. A creature that is, at its most fundamental level, all appetite and dependence.

Peter is writing to grown people — people who have survived displacement, social ostracism, and the daily friction of living as strangers among those who do not share their allegiances. These are not fragile souls. They are burdened, serious, morally striving men and women. And Peter’s word to them is not persevere or stand firm or mature in your understanding. The word is: long. Crave. Ache for what gives life.

As if the most clarifying thing they could do — the most spiritually honest posture available to them — is to be hungry.

Infants do not hunger politely.

They do not moderate their need in order to preserve dignity. They do not think: I do not wish to trouble anyone. They do not wait for a more convenient moment. They cry because hunger overtakes decorum. Need announces itself — without apology, without qualification, without any of the social machinery adults deploy to signal that everything is fine.

Adults become masters at that machinery. We cultivate competence, composure, the bearing of people who have things sufficiently in hand. We sit in pews, say the Creed, offer our prayers, exchange the peace, and quietly carry hollowness we have learned not to name. We know how to look fed even when inwardly we are not. The performance becomes so habitual that we sometimes lose track of the hunger beneath it. We mistake the composure for the condition.

Peter quietly strips all of that away. Not with argument, but with image. You are not, he suggests, as self-sufficient as you appear. Beneath the competence, beneath the composure, beneath whatever careful structure you have built to keep need hidden — there is an infant. And that infant is hungry.

The command to long arrives in the same breath as a quiet acknowledgment: if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.

That if is not a condition of doubt. It is a condition of memory. Psalm 34, which Peter is drawing on here, does not instruct its reader to imagine what goodness might taste like. It speaks to someone who already knows — who has been in the pit, who has cried out, who has been heard, who carries in the body the memory of what it was to be met. Taste and see that the Lord is good. The tasting comes first. The seeing follows.

Peter is pointing to something already present — already known, already tasted, perhaps half-forgotten beneath the accumulated weight of difficulty and displacement and the daily labor of faithful living in an unfriendly world. The hunger he names is not new. It is the hunger of people who have already encountered something worth returning to.

Long for the pure, spiritual milk is less command than recognition: you know this hunger. You have tasted what gives life. That earlier tasting is precisely what makes the longing possible — and what makes the longing, once honestly acknowledged, feel less like failure and more like awakening.

This is the most counterintuitive thing Peter has to say to a community of serious believers.

We tend to imagine spiritual maturity as a kind of graduation — the slow accretion of knowledge, practice, and experience until we arrive at a place of relative self-sufficiency in the things of God. We have learned. We have grown. We need, perhaps, a little less than we once did.

Peter imagines it differently. The movement he describes is not away from hunger but deeper into it — not outgrowing need, but growing into a more honest, more undefended awareness of it. Maturity, in his account, looks less like independence and more like the newborn’s clarity: knowing what you need, and being unwilling to pretend otherwise.

The passage moves from here into the language of living stones and chosen people, of priesthood and proclamation — a vision of what this hungry, dependent, milk-fed community is being built into together. That is its own meditation. But it rests on this foundation: people who have stopped pretending to be fed.

People who remember what they tasted.

People who have become hungry again.

That is nearer to holiness than we have imagined — not arriving at some settled fullness, but recovering the courage to hunger openly for what alone gives life.

The saints are not those who no longer hunger.

They are those who have stopped pretending they do not.