Blessed: Those That Mourn - Matthew 5:1-2, 4
Have you ever looked out into the world and
just wanted to cry? I’m not talking
about being unhappy with the weather because you were counting on going to the
Cape and it is blowing up a storm, or being on the way to church and realizing
that it is just the opposite, a beautiful everybody-else-is-going-to-be-at-the-shore
kind of day. What I am talking about is
looking out at those who are truly hurting in the world—the hungry, the homeless,
the sick, the abused, the addicted, the enslaved, the forgotten—and really just
had your heart break for them?
That's where we find ourselves this week in
Jesus’ blessings that we consider the Beatitudes.
We started this series last week. We considered
that while as a kid we might have liked having our world turn upside down, as
adults we usually don't like it when things are flipped upside down. Yet Jesus
is always about turning the world upside down.
We discussed that Jesus comes in and calls those blessed that we and the
world would not normally consider blessed. We shouldn’t, despite all the
paraphrases and translations that do, understand “blessed” as “happy,” because
being happy is simply an emotional state. Being blessed, as Jesus uses it, is
more than simply not feeling sad. Jesus is not talking about an emotional
state, but a state of being, a condition of existence. To be blessed, remember,
is to be considered fortunate, well-off, or privileged. Last week we began be hearing Jesus tell us
that we fortunate if we understand that we are not and cannot be
self-sufficient, and are wholly and completely dependent on God.
This week we hear Jesus say blessed are those
who mourn, for they will be comforted.
For most of my life, I thought that Jesus was
talking about those who had lost a loved one, and that the comfort came in
those that surrounded them in their grief and in the hope and assurance of the
resurrection to come. However, I could never reconcile that with that old notion
of blessed being interchangeable with being happy. How could you mourn the loss
of someone you cared about and be happy at the same time? Of course, now that I
have been in the ministry for nearly 23 years, I can understand how there are
families who feel happy that a loved one’s pains and struggles have come to an
end and that the loved one is now at rest with Jesus. Yet with our new
understanding of blessed being privileged, well-off, or fortunate, that kind of
slips away. Many of us might say, and I’ve
heard it said many times, “they are in a far better place.” They are the ones
who are blessed, privileged, well-off, and fortunate. It would make sense to us if Jesus said,
“blessed are those who have died,” but Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.” There must
be something different that Jesus is getting at and not simply talking about
those who are grieving a loved one’s passing…just what is Jesus doing that
turns our world upside down?
Just as Jesus’ reference to “The Poor” took us
back to the Psalms, so too does Jesus’ reference to those who mourn. Jesus is pulling on the traditions of the
Psalmist, Isaiah, Jeremiah and other biblical writers who mourn not the loss of
a someone they cared about, but are actually mourning the fact that the
community of God’s people have lost the vision of what it means to live as the
People of God and that the world itself has fallen and is not what God has
designed. In a sense it is about a
death, but not the death of a person, but the death of creation and humanity as
we were meant to be.
The Psalms are full of these laments, for
example the Psalmist writes:
How
long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How
long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How
long shall the enemy be exalted over me?
Consider
and answer me, O Lord my God! Give light
to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death, and my enemy will say, “I have
prevailed;” my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.[i]
Jeremiah’s lament is probably the best known
of the entire Old Testament, as his sorrow fills the book of Lamentations We can catch a brief glimpse of his sorrow in
the opening of the book:
How
lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was
great among the nations! She that was a
princess among the provinces has become a vassal.
She
weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks; among all her lovers she
has no one to comfort her; all her friends have dealt treacherously with her,
they have become her enemies.[ii]
Matthew even records a lament of Jesus later
in his Gospel:
Jerusalem,
Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to
it! How often have I desired to gather
your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were
not willing! See, your house is left to
you, desolate. For I tell you, you will
not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of
the Lord.’[iii]
My brothers and sisters, the question comes to
us, how do we feel when we see the pain and need of those in the world? Unfortunately sometimes we tend not to look
at it as Jesus sees it.
Sometimes we look at it judgmentally. We think that addict made their choices and
it serves them right that they are bound by that sin. We look at those living in poverty and think
they should have worked harder. We look
at the hungry begging on the street and figure they have spent all their money
on booze. We look at pregnant teenagers
and condemn their loose morals and their parent’s poor parenting skills.
Maybe it is not judgmentalism that comes from
us but a sense of uncaring callousness.
We have been hit so many times by so many images and it does not seem to
be getting any better, and so we just stop feeling anything. We stop feeling and stop caring.
Others of us live by the exact opposite of
what Jesus says and believe that ignorance is bliss. We turn a blind eye to all the hurt and pain
and simply focus on our own happiness.
Yet Jesus calls those who identify with the
poets, prophets, and himself, those who lament the condition of the world and
those living in it, those who mourn, blessed, fortunate, well-off,
privileged. While Jesus doesn’t come out
and say it, He strongly implies that those who sit in judgment, those who have
become callous, or those simply ignoring the struggling in the world, are not
blessed, that they may be the ones to be pitied. Why?
Well, God’s concern is for the weak, the hurting, the struggling, those
in pain, and those enslaved. His heart
has always been moved by their plight and their plea. To find ourselves mourning is to find
ourselves on the side of God—to have any other response is to find ourselves
aligned opposite Christ, it means we have joined the side of the adversary,
satan, himself.
However, finding themselves on the side of God
is not the reason that Jesus says those mourning are blessed. Jesus says they
will be comforted. Jesus offers to those
who see and ache on behalf of those who are suffering, struggling, and lost in
the world, “know that your sadness and sorrow has been seen by God and God will
respond.”
If we look closely at the laments of the
Psalms and the Prophets, while they begin in sorrow, they always end with the
hope and assurance that God is going to come and God is going to act. God is going to make everything right. For those of us who mourn, we will find
comfort in the realization, assurance, and witness of God coming in and
restoring things to the way they should be—things may be bad, things may get
worse, and we may live as people who may ache over what we see in the
world. However, we ache with the hope
and assurance that God is going to act, that God is going to do something about
it. We realize that while things may seem bleak, that often “ it is darkest
before the dawn.” We believe that the
dawn will come, the Son has risen and will return again, and the day will come
where “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more….”[iv] Jesus says, “Very truly, I tell you, you will
weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain
will turn to joy…So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your
hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”[v] And that day when God “turns [our] mourning
into dancing; [and takes off our] sackcloth and [clothes us] with joy,”[vi]
we will find ourselves sitting at God’s Great Banquet Table as part of the
greatest celebration of Victory the world has ever known.
This morning we will come to the Table and
experience a taste of that Victory Banquet…and as we celebrate the gift of
Christ’s sacred meal, my brothers and sisters, find yourself on the side of
God, mourn with Him at the pain and suffering in the world, but know that
comfort is coming, for He will act, and rejoice!
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and
of the Holy Spirit! Amen.
[i] Psalm 13:1-4
[ii] Lamentations 1:1-2
[iii] Matthew 23:37-39
[iv] Revelation 21:4
[vi]
Psalm 30:11
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