'Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.'Matthew 5:4
This passage comes from the Beatitudes, which is a series of blessings that Jesus gives at the beginning of his Sermon on the Mount. He is teaching his disciples and so we can learn from these blessings about what it means to follow Christ.
To illustrate this challenging Beatitude, I wish to look at three examples of mourning and comfort in the Old Testament.
The first example comes from the book of Job. Some people believe Job lived in the times of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He was a righteous man - but due to a battle in heaven, in which the devil challenged Job - and God's - integrity, God allowed the devil to destroy much of Job's life in order to test Job. First Job's children died in an accident, and then Job was struck with sores across his whole body.
Job tears his robe and sits in mourning for seven days and seven nights. This is the first kind of mourning I want to look at: mourning the loss of life. Three of his friends come to comfort him, joining him in his sorrow.
But Job is not comforted. After these seven days, he speaks. He curses the day of his birth and asks where God is, why God has allowed this trial and what Job has done to deserve it.
Job's friends then speak, but they prove to be poor comforts. They blame Job for what they see as God's punishment upon him, telling him that he must repent.
After various rounds of Job and his friends arguing, it is God's turn. God finally speaks out of a storm:
Gird your waist like a man;
I will question you, and you shall answer me.Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?Job 38:3-4
These words, 'Gird your waist like a man,' encourage and strengthen Job. They stir him to get up from his despair and come face to face with the God he has been calling out for. Thus Job finds peace. His questions are not directly answered, but somehow, in his face to face experience of God, Job is satisfied. He realises that God is far beyond him, that his situation is not something he can understand, but that ultimately God is ruler over all. He expresses his humility, his lowness before God, and God exalts him. God restores his life and blesses him with more children. Though his first children are not brought back to life, Job is vindicated and redeemed.
I was recently speaking with someone about this Beatitude, 'Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.' This person knows someone whose child died at an early age. Even many years after the child's death, the mother continues to feel the pain of her loss. The person I was speaking to said that Jesus' words had not come true, saying, 'She hasn't been comforted.'
My first reaction was to try to defend Jesus' words. Surely Jesus cannot be wrong, so I thought of reasons why the mother might be in the wrong. Maybe she has not truly mourned and this is why she has not received comfort.
Thankfully, I kept quiet. I thought of Job and how his friends had done the same thing: they had put the blame on him, when in reality, Job had done nothing to deserve his suffering. The only way Job could be comforted was through an encounter with God. So too, I believe the only way this mother can receive comfort is through an encounter with God. All I can do is pray for that encounter to take place in God's time.
Perhaps we can learn how to help others in their grief through the book of Job. The best thing Job's friends did for him was spend time with him in silence those first seven days of his mourning. Maybe when others are mourning, the best thing we can do is be there for them, and help them to make space for that dialogue with God that only they can have, help them to listen to God - for the question is ultimately between them and God.
The second example of mourning comes from the book of Jonah, and it is mourning the loss of relationship with God and others because of sin.
God calls the prophet Jonah to preach against the wicked city of Nineveh. This city is the capital of the Assyrian Empire, known for its ruthless violence against its enemies - including Israel.
Jonah runs away from God because Jonah knows that he is being sent to Nineveh to give them the chance to repent and receive God's mercy, which is the last thing he wants for them. He is swallowed by a large fish at sea and vomited back onto dry land and only then does he accept God's task for him.
Jonah goes into Nineveh and preaches against them. Perhaps to our surprise (but not to Jonah's), Nineveh listens. The greatest to the least of them, from the king all the way down to the peasants, mourn over their sin. The king takes off his royal robes and issues a decree for all of the people to mourn in the hope that God will change his mind.
The Ninevites' mourning is perhaps one of the clearest pictures of mourning we can look to. First, they fast - not only the people, but even the livestock! Second, they wear sackcloth. They publicly display their grief the way people wear black at funerals. Third, they pray to God. Fourth, they change their wicked ways. This last part is the most important, but the first three prepare their hearts to change.
They mourn over all they have done to grieve God, over all of the loss of life and relationship that their wickedness has caused, and in return, they receive the comfort of God's mercy. God does not do what he had planned to them, and we learn of the deep love and care that God has even for them.
I choose this story partly because the mourning over sin comes from people we don't expect. When I first began preparing this sermon, I thought of asking, 'Who are the people in our society, in our communities who need to mourn over their sin?' How easy it is to look for sin in others, but how difficult to notice the sin in myself!
The surprise in this story is that, by the end of the story, it is Jonah who is in need of repentance. He receives no comfort from God because he wishes for the destruction of his enemies when God wishes for their salvation. Indeed, God does not want anyone to perish - although we might - but that all might turn to him and be saved.
The first place we must look when we think about mourning over sin is ourselves. What sins must we repent from? How can we mourn over the evil attitudes and behaviours in our lives?
Repentance is not something we do only once in our walk as Christians. It should be an ongoing attitude, daily confessing our need for God's mercy and healing upon our lives. When we mourn over our brokenness and sin, whether those in the present or from the past, we can be assured by the comfort that God will be quick to forgive, that God will meet us with his mercy.
The third and final example of mourning comes from Psalm 42:
As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God?
My tears have been my food day and night,
while men say to me all day long,
'Where is your God?'These things I remember as I pour out my soul: how I used to go with the multitude,
leading the procession to the house of God
with shouts of joy and thanksgiving
among the festive throng.vv. 1-4
It is not clear why the psalmist is in despair, but from the last lines of the above quote, it sounds like the psalmist is mourning over the loss of the past. He had once been full of joy and thanksgiving, leading worship in the house of God. Perhaps he is also mourning over the loss of an identity he once had as a leader.
Do we grieve seasons of life that have passed?
The psalmist speaks to his own soul, and here he finds comfort:
Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Saviour and my God.v. 5
The psalmist's comfort comes from hope in God. In spite of the weight of his despair, he reminds himself of what God has done and that God has a good future for him, that he will again praise God.
Notice the psalm's references to water. When Jonah is in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights, he prays a portion of Psalm 42: 'all your waves and breakers have swept over me' (v. 7).
Some Christians see Psalm 42 as pointing to Christ. Verse 6 says, 'My soul is downcast within me; therefore I will remember you from the land of the Jordan.' The land of the Jordan is where Christ was baptised, where he went under the waters.
Baptism points to when Christ lay in the belly of the great fish of death for three days. Perhaps Jesus prayed this psalm too as he descended into darkness.
I think the most important thing I can say about mourning and comfort is that Jesus has experienced the depths of mourning and the heights of God's comfort. Like Job, Jesus mourned the loss of life - of others, and his own. When his friend Lazarus died, Jesus wept. And Jesus himself underwent the unjust death on a cross, where he prayed, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'
Many people have experienced unjust, painful deaths - some worse than Jesus'. But the tragedy and glory of Christ's crucifixion is that he was the Son of God. He was God in human form, the very one we would think would not experience such a death. Yet he laid down his life because he loved us. In dying and rising again, Christ has conquered death and sorrow. God vindicated Jesus like he vindicated Job - and so we can trust that as we follow Jesus through the waters, we too will rise again.
We do not know when the comfort will come. It may come in this life. It may not come until we are united with God in heaven. But we can trust Jesus' words, knowing that although we mourn today, we have hope that we will one day gird ourselves and stand before God in praise.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
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