Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. (Matthew 5:4)
On the face of it, Jesus’s second beatitude seems the closest to contradiction. Blessed — that is, happy — are those who mourn? The eighth and final beatitude on the persecuted and reviled comes close. But being persecuted and happy isn’t quite as paradoxical as being grieved and happy.
We might miss this irony because we don’t really know what blessedness means. Today we can’t rehearse enough what this blessedness is and is not. We call this opening salvo of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount “the Beatitudes” because of Jesus’s refrain (“Blessed . . . Blessed . . . Blessed . . .”), and beatitude is from the Latin beatus, meaning “blessed” or “happy.” Daniel Webster was still on top of it in 1828: Beatitude indicates “blessedness; felicity of the highest kind; consummate bliss; used of the joys of heaven.”
Having lost touch with these ancient roots in divine bliss, we’re quick to miss what an astounding, and then counterintuitive, offer of supreme happiness Jesus makes to us. With this “blessed” offer, he invites us into the very happiness of God himself, who made the world from his fullness, not emptiness, and magnifies his fullness as he gladly fills our emptiness. All eight beatitudes are counterintuitive, counter-worldly, but nothing challenges blessedness quite like mourning, grief, sadness, sorrow.
So, what does Jesus mean by declaring God’s own happiness over those who mourn?
Mourn What?
We do have one stated explanation in line:
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
A biblically attuned ear might recognize the soundtrack: Isaiah 61:1–3 and the sweeping promises of final good for God’s own people. He will send his specially anointed “to bind up the brokenhearted” and “comfort all who mourn” (verses 1–2). All doesn’t mean every mourner everywhere but all who are his, all who are “in Zion” (as today we’d say “in Christ”). He will “grant to those who mourn in Zion . . . the oil of gladness instead of mourning” (verse 3).
Even as this great theme plays in the background, a first question emerges: What loss are God’s people mourning?
Isaiah’s hearers were mourning the decline and approaching devastation of their nation. Generation after generation had been raised on the triumphs of Moses and Joshua, of David and Solomon. Their own ancestors had been rescued from the depths of slavery, received God’s promise of their own land, and risen to stunning heights under David and his son. But three centuries later, the nation was a shell of its former self, waning inexorably in widespread disobedience to the covenant, while foreign powers arose and threatened to subjugate the weakening nation. Isaiah’s hearers loved their heritage, and mourned the loss of their honor and freedom.
In Jesus’s day, such mourning continued. Now the power was Rome. But the causes for grief were far more than political. The righteous remnant among them knew that beneath the humbling of Israel lay both the nation’s sin and the sins of every Israelite.
Even the wicked will mourn the loss of a beloved city (as the unbelieving grieve over Babylon, Revelation 18). The righteous in Christ mourn such losses too, but Christian mourning does not end with the loss of some love once enjoyed. It grieves sin against God, our own and others’ (1 Corinthians 5:2; 2 Corinthians 12:21).
Good Mourning
Good mourning grieves and weeps over genuine losses, as Jesus did at Lazarus’s tomb. And good mourning, in the very midst of mourning, tastes a sustaining joy. Even as we mourn what is now lost, we experience hope that the Giver of joy is not lost but stands ready to sustain us and satisfy us.
Good mourning also prepares the way for real joy. Which is in part why Ecclesiastes would say it’s good to visit the house of mourning (7:2). Greater joy, not lesser joy, lies on the other side of mourning. How could sorrow be better than laughter? Because “by sadness of face the heart is made glad” (7:3).
In fact, good mourning is essential to experience true spiritual joy. You have never lived one moment without a sin nature. And you’ve never lived one moment in a world not under the curse. Jesus didn’t come to pre-fall humans in the garden of primal joy to offer them the tree of life; he came to post-fall humans, under the curse of sin and death, to be himself the curse for our sins and so make the cross into a tree of life for us.
Who Comforts?
Now, we have a second question to answer in his second beatitude: Who will do the comforting?
Jesus’s word for comfort here is a common New Testament word (parakaleō) we often translate “urge,” “exhort,” or “encourage.” It’s not a comfort for the body provided by pillows. It’s a comfort for the spirit brought through words. The comfort Jesus promises for the mourning is spiritual comfort, a comfort of soul, presented through divine promises and gospel truth.
The rest of the New Testament will tell of how the apostles do this through their inspired epistles (1 Thessalonians 2:12; Hebrews 13:19, 22; 1 Peter 5:12). And vitally, the people of God do this for each other in mutually life-giving words (1 Thessalonians 4:18; 5:11; 2 Corinthians 13:11; Hebrews 3:13; 10:25). Church leaders do this for Christ’s people through word ministry (1 Thessalonians 3:2; 1 Timothy 5:1; 2 Timothy 4:2). But ultimately, in and through the words of apostles and pastors and fellow believers, the supreme comforter of holy, mourning souls is God himself, who comforts his people through his human vessels with the comfort that he himself provides (2 Corinthians 7:6).
Jesus Mourned and Wept
Let’s come back to Jesus, who speaks these Beatitudes. Jesus himself mourned. He lived here too, in this fallen, cursed world. And he wept (John 11:35). He was not sinful or immature to be a “man of sorrows.” Instead, his acquaintance with grief, as the perfect man, was a shining expression of his maturity and holiness. Brace yourself: In the days of his flesh, he prayed with loud cries and tears (Hebrews 5:7). And we find strength, not flaw, in those holy tears. It is not holy to live without grief in this age of sorrows. Nor is it honorable to grieve like unbelievers do — without deep, solid, stabilizing hope.
Nor does Paul leave any stoic example. Again and again he wets the pages of his letters with mention of his tears (Acts 20:19, 31; 2 Corinthians 2:4; Philippians 3:18). Both Christ himself and his apostle to the Gentiles lived this second beatitude in their own lives as they shed tears of this age while being upheld with the blessedness of God himself and the age to come. And in doing so, they showed us the nature of the kingdom Jesus came to bring and Paul gladly served till his death.
Christ’s is not a kingdom of pomp and strut, not a reign of swagger and coercion, not a kingdom of this world. So, as Don Carson observes,
Those who claim to experience all its joys without tears mistake the nature of the kingdom. (Matthew, 163)
A day is coming when our God will wipe away every tear (Revelation 7:17; 21:4). His sons will not always mourn. But until then, in this age of mourning, our Lord is honored by joy in sorrow, peace in pain, satisfaction in him in the midst of our sufferings, joy inexpressible even while grieved by various trials (1 Peter 1:6–8).
Jesus is not honored by any pretense to be rid of sorrows prematurely. But he appoints for us griefs in this world — and with them, his sustaining grace to keep us.
True and final happiness is for those who mourn for now.
Desiring God