Thoughts on the Beatitudes, Part 4: Blessed are those who mourn; they shall be comforted.

If we know anything about Jesus, it is that his simple sayings never are. The Beatitudes are no exception. Each statement prompts questions that beget more questions until we have a whole noisy clan of them begging for our attention. Today we have a typical example: The happy disciple is a person who mourns. We immediately wonder what that means. What is mourning, exactly? What kinds of things should we mourn for? Are there different kinds of mourning, and is some of it not the kind that brings blessing?

If I think about the times I have experienced mourning, the most obvious definition of the word is an emotional reaction either to losing or failing to gain something. Death is the loss that most obviously comes to mind, but it stands in good company with many other sources of grief in our lives.

Imagine the countless other losses we face in our small worlds. When we are very young, every point of resistance or opposition to our desires produces a vehement response of mourning. How many mothers have endured a cascade of tears over the disposal of a favorite blanket or bear? What is childhood without the art of the adamant “NO!” and the tantrum in response to our parents’ refusal to cater to our every demand? I remember being in fifth grade and hearing a presentation on a summer trip to France. I spent two weeks cajoling my father in the hopes of spending two weeks in Paris, all to no avail. I spent the next two weeks in abject misery on receiving his final denial of my fond dreams. Surely the world had ended, and yet the French fiasco was only one of countless examples of childhood and adolescent grief over similarly traumatic events that seem embarrassingly trivial in retrospect.

Growing older, we generally fall apart less frequently and perhaps less demonstrably. Our mourning is more sophisticated and our losses are more consequential. Relationships disappoint us; our university of choice sends a rejection letter; a job application doesn’t work out; we live with family conflict, sickness, infirmity, financial struggles – each involving its own form of bereavement.

What strikes me here is the intimate connection of mourning with our wills. Something that we counted on in some way has been taken from us, marring our happiness. Our response is normal, even universal. Surely it’s not that Jesus wants to super-spiritualize us or have us deny that we suffer. And yet he contradicts our intuitive sense of what mourning is about. We certainly don’t feel that blessedness that he is promising; instead, apart from grace the best we often do is a muted acceptance or the dim relief of forgetfulness.

So what does true mourning look like for redeemed humans? I think we arrive at the first hint of an answer by going back to Jesus’ prior blessing on the poor in spirit. In our spiritual poverty we see something of our penchant for elevating our selves according to the lie that we can “be like God.” I have become a usurper of the divine throne, seeking my own purpose and my own kingdom over his. This is why David can say, “against you only have I sinned” (Pss. 51:4). All of our anger, our lust, our envy, greed, and sloth arise from our idolatrous rejection of the Lord’s claim to be the only God, and our only good.

When I consider this idea of mourning over sin, my conclusion is that I get it backwards. One embarrassing example will suffice. On a recent family trip, I was instrumental in our becoming lost (or, as I once infamously put it, “misplaced”). Instead of admitting that I was wrong, and following with a contrite apology, I tried all the guilt-avoidance mechanisms common to my sex. There was the attempt to ignore, the bluster about really knowing where we were, the casting about for something or someone else to blame. Granted, this was not a big thing to take responsibility for, and an appropriate act of mourning would have been a quick and relatively painless affair. But, in the end, I decided to mourn the wrong thing, which was the loss of my status as the “way-finder” and the subsequent wounding of my ego.

When we mourn the wrong things or in the wrong way; or when we refuse to mourn the true offenses that we have given, we end up seeking comfort in all the wrong places. The end result is false, temporary consolation. For me, mourning the damage to my idol self brought no blessing, certainly not that of Jesus’ promise.

This misdirected mourning principle applies to all kinds of circumstances. Two weeks ago, as I was making great progress on rehabilitating my recently repaired rotator cuff, I took a  tumble on some hidden ice and ended up seriously injuring the other shoulder. The resulting renewed and enhanced limitations brought more than just physical pain. The next day I fell into an uncharacteristic melancholy that I attempted to salve by eating about five times more than I normally would at dinner. Again, a small thing that looks somewhat funny in retrospect, but characteristic of my tendency to mourn in a way that focusses on me, rather than on the Father and his kingdom.

Which leads to our second clue about how a disciple mourns in a beatitudinal way, which is to look at how and why Jesus mourns. There are two passages that explicitly depict Jesus expressing grief. The first is John 11:33-38, which describes his reaction to Lazarus’ death. Three words attract our attention: Jesus was deeply moved (in vv. 33 and 38); he was troubled; and he wept. There are complex ideas here. It seems pretty obvious that Jesus is in mourning for a friend simply out of a sense of personal loss, as well as in sympathy with the two sisters. But there is also a kind of indignation against death itself in the way that he is affected (the word for “deeply moved” comes from the idea of a horse snorting). The world and the evil one have distorted and disfigured human existence, such that Jesus experiences a kind of righteous anger against our enemies.

The second set of verses that detail Jesus’ reason for mourning occurs in Luke 19:41-44. In this passage, the Son of Man weeps over Jerusalem, the city that represents all of us in our resistance to Jesus’ “visitation” in our lives (v. 44). God grieves for our sin, for our hardness of heart, for our stubborn refusal to accept his kindness and mercy, for our insistence on being rich, rather than poor in spirit.

How, then, do we mourn to be happy? I have found at least a partial answer in reading and praying Psalms 51, a song of repentance. Throughout, David sets his heart on what is true about himself and about God. He expresses his poverty of spirit, declaring his innate sinfulness. He brings no excuses, and makes no boasts about what he can or will do. He makes his plea to the only one who can help him: “Cleanse, renew, restore; receive me into your presence; make me a worshipper; teach me so that I can teach others your ways.”

Admission, contrition, submission, consolation. These are the manifestations of mourning, whether for our own lives, for the world, for the church, for our families, for our fellow disciples. Poverty of spirit is the seed out of which mourning grows – a seed that only the Father can plant and fruit that only his grace can bring forth. In the end, our prayer is that Jesus will mourn in and through us as bearers of his own image.