Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. -Matthew 5:4
One of the many titles of Christ is “Comforter.” Out of his endless love God comes to us as fully human. As fully God and man, Jesus mourns with us and for us, which is great news, but his atoning power and resurrection promises so much more than a sympathetic ear or important moral teachings. Despite the pain and affliction, Christ will transform our condition.
The type of mourning Christ speaks about in the Beatitudes is not just sadness, wailing or gnashing of teeth concerning our pitiful circumstances. Our Lord’s emphasis in the passage is on godly sorrow. Even the worldly and those who despise God can gnash their teeth and rage over their circumstances. But those who are close to the heart of God mourn over their sin and spiritual paralysis.
One of the problems with large segments of Christianity today, especially in the West, is that there is not enough mourning over sin. Sadly, some churches and sects that claim Christ openly celebrate sin and defy God’s Word. Christ is not speaking or offering comfort to those in continual defiance who rage against the will of God but, rather, those who are being made like him and in his image.
It is right to mourn for the world, which is unjust, cruel and unfair. “Those who mourn for the way the world is bear witness against the powers that be that things are not right,” declares Pope Benedict XVI.
The German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “By ‘mourning’ Jesus, of course, means doing without what the world calls peace and prosperity: He means refusing to be in tune with the world or to accommodate oneself to its standards. Such men mourn for the world, for its guilt, its fate, and its fortune.”
Christ, whom the prophet Isaiah calls “a man of sorrows,” is not content with the world and the way he saw it. His compassion means he will not leave us in the condition he found us. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke’s Gospel is just a glimpse of the stunning reversal God has in mind for his people (Luke 16:19–31).
The powers that be in the world, the powers that run the world, do not want you to focus on the injustice of the world. They would rather you be distracted by entertainment culture and material things.
When we mourn for the world and its fate, we are saying that it is not supposed to be this way. That injustice, persecution and affliction are not the normal order of things. But when we engage the world on behalf of Christ and are grounded in the Word and spirit, we can powerfully witness against all the disorder and affliction that man has wreaked upon earth and point to the one who has “overcome the world.”
