"Hunger for Justice will change the world" says Archbishop of Canterbury

Today's people need to feel the same hunger for justice that ended the slave trade,if the world is to be changed for the better, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams urged, speaking in his New Year message, broadcast on BBC Television in the UK on New Year's Eve and repeated on New Year's Day.

Drawing on the example of William Wilberforce to urge people to act to change the world, Dr. Williams said, "Jesus talks about being hungry and thirsty for righteousness, for justice. And if we hear that in the way it's surely meant, we have to conclude that he means that we should feel there's something missing in us, something taken away from us, when another person, near or far away, has to face need and suffering. We get to be ourselves only when we wake up to them and their needs."

The reformers, the archbishop said, regarded the slave trade as making the whole of humanity less than human. "People like William Wilberforce and Henry Thornton felt they were made less human than they should be by the appalling injustice of the slave trade. They felt a hunger for justice – a sense of being spiritually impoverished – 'undernourished' because of slaver," he said.

People, he said, may feel overwhelmed or even bored by constant appeals, but change could only come if people were moved to act. "When we look at the familiar images of other people's suffering, do we feel a void inside ourselves, a yearning for something different and a conviction that it needn't be like this? That's where change begins. And it's one of the differences that faith can make; faith in God and in people," he said.