Blessed Are Those Who Mourn

In a previous post from Matthew 5:3 we learned something that is still true today: the indispensable condition of receiving the kingdom of God is to acknowledge our spiritual poverty and surrender ourselves to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. For God still sends the proud away empty because the way up in God’s kingdom is the way down. This is countercultural wisdom.

In the next verse of the Sermon on the Mount we are presented with more paradoxical words from Jesus. Matthew 5:4 - “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.”

The word for mourning here is not that of a brief sadness, like when your basketball team loses early in March madness, but one that we would use to describe a huge grief and lament, most commonly for the loss of a close loved one. It is grief that shakes us to the core. How can such grief be “blessed”? It seems a contradiction in terms to talk of “happy are those who mourn.”

There seems to be a couple of aspects to what Jesus means here.

Firstly, there is a sense that those who deeply mourn, often have nowhere else to turn but God to make sense out of their loss and grief. I am often struck when spending time with bereaved families how many of them seek comfort and hope in God and begin to see a deeper meaning and purpose to life. The cause of mourning is rarely one that any of us would choose, but the act of mourning can lead us to a place of healing and hope.

We see that even as Jesus mourned the death of Lazarus where the shortest verse in the New Testament reads, “Jesus wept.” (John 11:35) But help is always near. “The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit .” (Psalm 34:18)

Secondly, to mourn is also to mourn our own failings and “acknowledge and mourn our sins”. When convicted of our sinfulness, we are sorrowful and remorseful, for the way we have hurt others, for the times we have let God down. Charles Spurgeon, the “preacher to preachers”, says it this way: “It does not spoil your happiness to confess your sin. The unhappiness is in not making the confession.” Charles Spurgeon

Jesus doesn’t want us to wallow in our inadequacies and failings but find a place of blessing. The good place, the happy place is when our sorrow, our contrition, for what we have done, leads us to this realization - despite all of this, God loves us and forgives us. We cannot appreciate the fulness of that if we fail to mourn over our sins to the point of confession.

So, Jesus says, you are in a good place when you grieve for loved ones rather than try to discount or ignore your grief, or when you sorrow over your sins rather than try and brush them under the carpet, because in doing so you will know the comfort of God. What an encouraging upside-down view of what leads to being in a good place, a place of blessing.

Friends don’t be tempted to think that when all our needs are met, when we are self-reliant, when life is comfortable that we are happy. Instead, recognize we are always in need of God. So, acknowledge the depths of your grief, and weep over falling short of the glory of God. Then you will discover a God who is comforter and healer and Savior.


Credit: Ron Kelley