Blessed Are Those Who Mourn

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

I have been thinking about this second beatitude a lot over the past couple of months. It is about both identification and promise. Jesus, after all, mourned¬¬-––He mourned over Jerusalem that rejected Him; He sighed over the suffering of the deaf man; famously, He wept over the pain that Lazarus’ death caused his family and friends.

Significantly, Jesus promised that a time of comfort was coming. It seems to me that He was speaking both of the temporal and eternal. Paul declared that the Lord is “the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles” (2 Cor 1:3-4). The Psalms repeatedly assert that when we turn to the Lord in our troubles, He comforts and sustains us. But I believe there is a deeper promise in the second beatitude that points our hearts to an ultimate resolution, an eternal solace, contentment and satisfaction.

I need this beatitude because, increasingly, I am aware that, at a deep and quiet level, I am mourning. 

At the core of this mourning is the reality that as a follower of Christ and His Kingdom, I am now an alien and stranger in this world. In the famous “faith chapter”, the writer to the Hebrews said that the Old Testament heroes realized this and lived accordingly (Heb 11:13). Repeatedly, Peter addressed the church as “strangers in the world”, even reminding them to embrace this (1 Pe 1:17; 2:11). If we are going to truly follow Jesus’ steps as His disciples, then alienation will mark our lives. The great 19th C preacher, Charles Spurgeon, wrote: “How settled soever their condition be, yet this is the temper of the saints upon earth––to count themselves but strangers.” 

Increasingly, I am mourning over the essential brokenness of the world. We are confronted with this daily as the news carries a seemingly endless succession of terrorist attacks, battles and wars breaking out in various parts of the world. I am deeply saddened by the anger, and the inevitable suffering among the innocent that it leads to. No wonder William Wordsworth penned, “The world is too much with us.”

I mourn over the blindness on both sides of conflict, over the myth that if we apply enough force, righteousness will win out. This denies the unwavering evidence of millennia that violence is never redemptive. Never, no matter what the cause. 

I mourn over a Christianity wrapped in self-justifying patriotism, instead of living as the counter-cultural salt and light that Jesus told us to embrace. After all, his command to love our enemies was as challenging to the oppressed and tyrannized people of first century Palestine as it is for us today.

Again and again, the New Testament writers remind us to lift up our eyes, to remember both our identity and our destiny. Our lives “receive their definition and direction from the future, not from the present, from God, not from the world.” No wonder we mourn.

So where is the promised comfort? It is in knowing where we are going. Like Abraham, we live here to be a blessing and a light; and like him, we keep our eyes on the prize, ”looking forward to the city with foundations whose architect and builder is God” (Heb 11:10).

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”