Blessed are those who mourn.
What are the beatitudes there for? What was Jesus doing when he gave these words to these people? For a long time, I saw these as a list of instructions somewhat similar to the Ten Commandments. I believed that Jesus was saying this was what he wanted his followers to be like, and it was up to them to become like it. It was only as I came to know my Bible a little better that this view began to change. For 2,000 years, the Jewish people had had a list of instructions to follow on how they were to become a holy people. The Old Testament books of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy give all of those instructions. And they had failed to do this, Jesus was the proof of that failure for if it was possible for us to have fellowship with God by following a set of rules, he would not have needed to die on the cross.
The last thing he was going to do was arrive on earth and set up a new set of rules that we have to follow for he knew that we would fail to do this just as we failed before. So why did he give them? To find that out we need to first look at the person who was the perfect example of all of these beatitudes. He told us, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”, he showed this in his own life by the words John gives us in Chapter 5:19: “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can only do what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does, the Son also does.” If you need further evidence of this, look in Philippians 2:5-11 at Paul’s words: “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death – even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
While we are touring the Bible, we may as well look at how the second of these beatitudes – “Blessed are those who mourn” was illustrated perfectly in Jesus’ life as well. Jesus knew exactly what it was to mourn. The shortest verse in our Bibles shows this. Two words in John 11:35 – ‘Jesus wept’. I am sure that not all of his mourning at that time was for Lazarus though, but rather for the unbelief being shown by those closest to him. Luke records a lesser known instance of Jesus’ mourning in chapter 19:41: As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had known on this day what would bring you peace – but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in one every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognise the time of God’s coming amongst you.” That was Jesus mourning for the sin of those around him, a sin that would lead to such pain and anguish as had seldom been heard.
When Jesus gave those beatitudes, he was giving a description of his own life. We find out more about why he gave them by looking at the people he gave the beatitudes too. The Sermon on the Mount begins with Matthew’s introduction: “Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and began to teach them, saying:” Jesus was not giving this sermon to crowds of people who did not know who he was. He was talking to twelve people who were called and chosen by God. Then look at what he says after the beatitudes: “You are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world.” In those two sentences Jesus is not telling his disciples what they will be at some point in the future, he is not saying they have to strive to become the light of the world or the salt of the earth, he says you are these things. Because they are called and chosen by God, they are these things. I believe that Jesus was saying the same thing about the beatitudes. He was not saying you must be like this, he was saying I am like this, and because I have called and chosen you, you are like this.
Of course, we have to work hard at allowing ourselves to remain like this; the devil is always going to do his best to stop us exhibiting the qualities or blessings that we have been given. But if we allow ourselves to think that these are things that we have to become, then the devil’s work is already done. If we approach the beatitudes and say, I have to do my best to be like this, then we already failing at the first hurdle. This one states, “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." To look at this beatitude and think ‘I can be like this’ means that you are not poor in spirit; to be poor in spirit means admitting that God must do His work through us, rather than us proudly working for God.
My brief for this morning was to look at the first two of the beatitudes, for the first one, I want to give you two other examples, apart from that of Jesus, of being ‘poor in spirit.’ The first is Gideon. He was the man who freed Israel from the power of the Midianites. He, with three hundred men, defeated thousands. From what we read of him in Judges 6-8, he was a mighty man. But look at what he thought of himself when he was called to do God’s work in Judges 6:15: “But Lord, Gideon asked, how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.” This is what it means to be poor in spirit. It means that you look at yourself, at all you have managed to do, and then look at God, and realise that without Him, you are nothing.
Another example was given to us last week during the baptism service by Tom’s words before he was baptised. Those words simply looked away from himself to God, the one who makes everything possible.
I want us to look mainly this morning at the second beatitude – Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. It seems a strange thing to say, ‘happy are those who mourn’. My Dad died in a crash when I was about sixteen, and I cannot say that that was a time of happiness or blessedness. There are those here today who are going through a time of mourning and the same will be true for you.
There are even times when mourning can stop us loving and serving God. I have known several Christian people who have become disabled in their adult lives and it seems they have had a choice, they could live their lives mourning what is past and or they can choose to live for today and choose to accept that what was in the past is over. They have accepted what they are today and have gone on to work and witness for God in various ways. The same is true for those who have been made redundant, you can mourn for your past life when you used to be working and have plenty of money, or you can see what God wants from you today. In these situations, it seems to be those who do not mourn who are most blessed, rather than those who mourn. This is actually a situation that we face as a Church at Longfleet today. We are in a period where we have no minister and we can either spend our time looking back and mourning for the time we did have one. Or we can look forward and continue to be a living vibrant Church without a full time Minister at present. To do this, requires the work and support of us all, but it can be done. And strangely, we will find that we are blessed if it is done.
I have seen Churches go into a time of interregnum and everything has gone on hold. We can’t do this because we don’t have a Minister, we can’t start this because we don’t have a Minister. This is the type of mourning that is not healthy for a Church. It is the Churches who discover that they can do things and start new things while they haven’t got a Minister that are the healthy ones. And these become doubly blessed, because when the new minister does arrive, he or she is free to do the work God has called them to do, simply because the people in the Church have discovered how God blessed them without a Minister.
So, what was Jesus talking about when he said ‘happy are those who mourn’? Eugene Peterson in the Message suggests one thing when he translates the verse to read: “You are blessed when you feel you have lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the one most dear to you.” Look at Job in the Bible, there was a man who had everything. The introduction to the book tells us: In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job. This man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil.
He had seven sons and three daughters, and he owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys, and had a large number of servants. He was the greatest man among all the people of the East.” Even God said of him: “There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil."
Yet, it was not until Job has lost everything that we see where his happiness truly was. It wasn’t in his family and belongings, it wasn’t in the respect given to him by others, Job discovered his happiness at the end of that book when he says: “"I know that you can do all things; no plan of yours can be thwarted. You asked, ’Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge?’ Surely, I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. "You said, ’Listen now, and I will speak; I will question you, and you shall answer me.’ My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes."
Job discovered God in his mourning. He could have turned away from Him, for remember, at the start he was a blameless and upright man. He could have lived out his life in the past, mourning for what he had lost. Instead, he allows God to embrace him, and he embraces God in return. This is the happiness that we can discover in mourning.
The Old Testament tells of another way that we can discover happiness in mourning. We are told in the second book of Samuel chapter 11 about one of the dangers of living in tower blocks. David was up on his roof when he sees this beautiful lady bathing. You will know the story of what follows, how David has sex with her, discovers she is pregnant, and then how he has to ensure that her fiancé dies. Following this, David married Bathsheba, but his sin resulted in the death of their son. Nathan the prophet confronted David with his sin, and on realising what he had done, he repented. Psalm 51 is one of the results of this time in David’s life. It is a Psalm of mourning for his own sin.
“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.
2 Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.
3 For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.
4 Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge.
5 Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.
6 Surely you desire truth in the inner parts ; you teach me wisdom in the inmost place.
7 Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.
8 Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice.
9 Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity.
10 Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
11 Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me.
12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.
13 Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will turn back to you.
14 Save me from bloodguilt, O God, the God who saves me, and my tongue will sing of your righteousness.
15 O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.
16 You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.
17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
Do we mourn our sin like this? If you are like me, the longer you have been a Christian, the easier it becomes to take our sin lightly. I have talked with people about holiness before and heard them say in a normal voice, “I will never be holy, I am human and a sinner.” It is almost as if they expect to sin, and it is not that important anymore. Have we really forgotten what the effect of our sin is? Have we forgotten that when we sin as Christians we hurt God even more than He was hurt as he had to watch His Son die alone on the cross? The last revivals this country saw were in Wales and Scotland many years ago. One of the main characteristics of those revivals was that people realised how much their sin hurt God. The Churches and chapels were full as people wept because of this.
It is only as we begin to truly mourn for our own sin that we will see a return to holiness amongst Christians today. If we continue to treat it as if it is something to be expected, then we will not be willing to change.
Another type of mourning found in the Old Testament is mourning for other people’s sin. If you look in the first book of Samuel, chapter 15, you will find the account of how Saul was rejected as king. He went to attack the Amalekites after being told by God to kill them all. He spared their King Agag, and because of this sin, Samuel told him: “You have rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you as king over Israel.” The final verse in this chapter tells us: “Until the day Samuel died, he did not go to see Saul again, though Samuel mourned for him.”
Do we mourn for our friends and acquaintances as Samuel mourned for Saul? I don’t think we do for if we did we would not need to hear sermons about the Churches and the Christians duty to witness. It is not fashionable to say this nowadays but the Bible is very clear on the fact that without Jesus in their lives, people are going to hell. And when we don’t mourn because of that, we become partly responsible for them being there.
When we do begin to mourn, we will begin to do all that we can to see that their destination changes. Unfortunately, there was nothing Samuel could do about Saul’s sin. But for us, there is plenty that we can do about the sin of our friends and colleagues. This doesn’t mean that we have to go around continually telling them how bad they are being, we don’t have to point out every sin they do. Wallace and Mary Brown, are an Anglican vicar and his wife who minister in a council housing estate in Birmingham. In their book, ‘Angels on the Walls’ they explain how they discovered that they must be willing to ‘Tell the people what their sins are.’
“Telling people what their sins are has since become the hallmark of St. B’s. Not in a self-righteous condemnatory way, but merely pointing people back to their loving heavenly Father and saying, ‘The greatest sin is to ignore God; to make Him an optional extra in your life. That really hurts him.”
This happened after they began to mourn for the sins of the people around them, and became willing to do something about it. This needs to happen to us all in our own Churches and our own situations today.
Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. That is the promise of Jesus, and it is as true today for us, as it was true two thousand years ago. It is true as we discover that God is the only one we really need in our lives, it is true as we mourn for our own sins and that mourning takes us deeper into God’s embrace, and out of our sin. It is true as we mourn for others, and that mourning empowers us to reach out and touch their lives. Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted, and who is the comforter? Job discovered that when he discovered it was none other than God.
Blessed are those who mourn, may we be those people today.
