Blessed…Mourn.
Blessed…Poor.
Blessed…Meek.
Blessed…Persecuted.
David Powlison refers to the Sermon on the Mount as Jesus’ keynote address and the beatitudes (Mt. 5:1-11) as the keynote of the keynote. The juxtaposition of the words above reveals just how different the kingdom of God is in comparison to the kingdoms of this world.
Blessed
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
We see the word on pallet-board art hanging in living rooms. We see it on t-shirts. We hear it in prayers asking God to bless this and bless that. Every President for the past forty years has ended each major public speech with the words, “God bless America.” At the end of a worship service I say a benediction or a “blessing” over the congregation.
When we use the word “blessed” we mean that either good things have happened and so we are thankful or we want good things to happen in the future.
When Jesus uses the word he means it in the same way. The blessed are the truly happy. In fact, the word Jesus uses here is often translated elsewhere simply as “happy.”
It is not that Jesus uses the word differently than we do. Sure, he means happiness in the truest, most lasting sense - something that we can’t experience fully yet. True, Jesus’ definition of happiness differs in degree but his happiness is not less it is more. As C.S. Lewis says, “it’s not that our Lord finds our desires too strong but too weak, we are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us…we are far too easily pleased.”
Despite our tendency to grasp for cheaper versions of blessing we do have plenty of glimpses of happiness. My mom used to have a picture on her wall that read, “Happiness is a cookie at grandmas.” And the picture is correct. My kids were never sad when they were eating one of my mom’s chocolate chip cookies. I’m guessing their happiness is a taste of the happiness Jesus is talking about. He often refers to the kingdom in terms of a banquet and we see him eating in the gospels all the time.
The difference, for Jesus, is not in how he uses the word “blessed” but in whom he describes as blessed.
Who is happy?
Happy are the poor in spirit. Happy are those who mourn.
Mourners, by definition, are those who are not happy. We mourn because there is loss. We mourn because things did not turn out as expected. We mourn because the world is not the way it is supposed to be. Some commentators suggest that the mourning Jesus is talking about is mourning over our sin. I am sure they are correct. But, I’d guess he is talking about more than that.
When Jesus gets to the tomb of Lazarus and sees the scene of pain and sorrow he gets visibly upset. We are told that he weeps. Death and its dark shadow of pain, suffering and destruction stirs up a deep mourning within the one who refers to himself as “the life.”
When Jesus looks over Jerusalem during his final week he mourns for the city – “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing” (Matthew 23:37).
Watching a good creation continuously go wrong brings sorrow to the one through whom all things were made. Jesus mourns because he loves.
Mourning Loves Company
We mourn for the same reasons. We mourn our own participation in the sin and suffering of this world and we mourn seeing it affect others. We mourn pandemics and divisive politics and racism. We mourn poverty and a world that creates refugees fleeing for freedom. We mourn war mongers and sex-trafficking and cancer.
And yet Jesus says that those who mourn are blessed. Of course, we have to finish the whole sentence. Those who mourn are blessed for they will be comforted. The mourning will not last forever. The verb is future. Comfort will come. Comfort will come because all the things that we mourn will be restored. “Everything sad is going to come untrue” as Tolkien has Samwise put it.
But, the blessing is not only for the future. The comfort is not only in the new heavens and the new earth. Mourning is connected to being poor in spirit. Poverty of spirit, as we saw last week, is the beginning of our faith. It is the recognition of our need. Recognition of need leads to crying out for help. It leads us to Jesus.
Mourning works in the same way. Mourning the reality of our own sin and mourning the reality that the world is not the way it is supposed to be compels us to seek help from the only source help at this scale can come – the one who is restoring all things. It leads us to Jesus.
And those who are in Jesus’ hands are blessed. But not exactly in the same way that the pallet-board wall hangings mean. Mourning, like poverty of spirit, is a posture. It is standing, or more accurately, weeping in solidarity with a world that is groaning for “the glorious freedom of the children of God.” And “the Spirit helps us in our weakness” (Rom. 8:26). When we mourn we are in good company.
Good Mourning
As a pastor of older congregations over the years, I have officiated far more funerals than weddings. The request I receive most from family members planning the funeral is to not make the service sad. I often hear something like, “Oh, she wouldn’t want us to make a big fuss,” or “he wouldn’t want a bunch of tears - make it a celebration.”
Such requests are often more about the family member’s desire to avoid engaging with death and mortality than the requests of the deceased. If nobody is sad when you are gone that probably means something went wrong while you were here - which is the cause for a different kind of mourning.
There are situations where people have suffered for so long that death can come as a relief and because our only comfort in life and in death is our faithful Savior Jesus Christ, death is not to be feared (see Paul in Philippians 1:19-26). But in the big picture death is always an intruder. God loves life. Therefore, anywhere life is not flourishing is cause to mourn. A funeral without tears is either dishonest or tragic. Neither of which smacks of blessing.
A funeral can be a celebration. I've attended and officiated many that were. But they were not celebrations because they weren't sad. They were terrifically sad. We mourned because life is so good and death takes it away. We celebrated because we bore witness to the reality that death does not have the last say. Death is doomed. "For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his" (Romans 6:5).
Mourning is the only proper response in the face of sin and death and suffering. Mourning is to align ourselves with Jesus - the man of sorrows. When we mourn we stand with him and where Jesus is there is love and grace, hope and life. Where Jesus is there is blessing. He is not only the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief but he has "borne our griefs and carried our sorrows" (Isaiah 53:4).
“Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.” Blessed are those who mourn.
Psalm 126:1 A song of ascents.
When the LORD brought back the captives to Zion, we were like men who dreamed.
2 Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy.
Then it was said among the nations, "The LORD has done great things for them."
3 The LORD has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy.
4 Restore our fortunes, O LORD, like streams in the Negev.
5 Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.
6 He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him.
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