By Elliot Ritzema
Scripture Reading: Matthew 5:4, Isaiah 66:12-14, Lamentations 3:55-57, John 11:17-44, John 16:20-22, 2 Corinthians 1:3-7
Every year at my small Christian high school, the yearbook staff would ask everyone in the senior class for a quote and a Bible verse to put next to their yearbook picture. During my senior year, many of my fellow students chose verses that could be classed as more inspirational. Meanwhile, I chose Psalm 34:18: “The LORD is near the brokenhearted; he saves those crushed in spirit.”
I wasn’t just being a moody emo kid or trying to stand out from the crowd (though I have been guilty of that at times). In the disappointments I’d already suffered in my teenage life, I had found comfort in knowing that the Lord was near even when I felt crushed. My feelings of abandonment were not a true indication that God was actually absent.
In the beatitudes, Jesus took the human desire for happiness and living a good life and turned it on its head. Those who are happy—the ones who are truly well off—He says here, are those who mourn—not those who skate through life without a care.
Yet what is the source of this mourning? Does it mean sadness by itself is good?
Interpreters have pondered over the years on what specifically this mourning is referring to. Rebekah Eklund writes in her book The Beatitudes Through the Ages that most Christian writers up until the Reformation regarded the mourning of this beatitude as limited to repentance. It was people mourning for their sins. Yet while repentance is certainly one kind of mourning that is in view, Eklund says, it is not all there is.
In John 11, for example, we see Jesus Himself among those who mourn at the grave of Lazarus. He had no sin of His own to mourn over, and yet He wept. Instead of limiting the mourning to repentance, it might be better to see the blessed ones as mourning for sin, full stop. They mourn at what sin has done to the world, how it has ground people down and brought on death and destruction. It is grief over the fallen world. This mourning enters the suffering of the world and laments the damage done, while at the same time looking forward to a time of consolation.
This helps us understand what was happening when Jesus wept before raising Lazarus. He was mourning over the loss of what life could have been without sin and death. He knew what He would do; He knew “sorrow [would] turn to joy” (John 16:20). Yet before that comfort that He Himself would provide, He joined with the world in its suffering.
Those who mourn, in this beatitude, join with Jesus in His dissatisfaction with the status quo. They long for Jesus to make everything new. As He does and as they receive comfort from Him, they are then able to comfort others who suffer from living in a fallen world (2Corinthians 1:4–5).
Written by Elliot Ritzema
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