We’re looking at the Beatitudes from Matthew 5 this month. Join us today for Matthew 5:4, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
When We Cry
“I’ll give you something to cry about!”
I hope you’ve never heard those words said to you in an outburst of anger.
But if you have heard them, it was probably when you were already crying, right? And you might have thought, but not replied out loud, “No thank you, I already have enough to cry about.”
When we’re sad and in pain, we don’t want more sadness or more pain.
When Jesus sat down on a mountain two thousand years ago, crowds of people gathered around Him. People who knew sadness, people who knew pain. They’d been living under foreign Roman tyranny for years. Their religion was under ridicule. Their health care options were unspeakably bad.
Yet within the first five minutes of His talk, Jesus tells them this:
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
Matthew 5:4
What did He mean? How would they interpret that?
How do we interpret it?
Comfort of Companionship
We, too, know mourning. Life hurts. Sad things happen to everybody. Friends betray, jobs disappear, bodies fail. Some is brought on by our own doing, some by the hands of others, and some just because this world is a fallen place. Every life has storms.
We want the pain to go away.
Is that what Jesus is promising here?
And do we have a right to be disappointed when we’re not comforted out of our pain?
But look closer at His words. Jesus wasn’t promising pain removal. Instead, He was assuring them of the comfort of companionship in it.
How Do I Get the Blessing?
The Beatitudes aren’t a legalistic series of do’s and don’t’s to guarantee blessedness. The Beatitudes are truth statements about gifts of grace we receive in the Kingdom.
We don’t have to do anything to receive the blessings. They come with our inheritance.
And our inheritance includes that all our mourning is only temporary.
Knowing it will get better later can make it a little better right now.
But what about when we’re too sad or pained to even hold hope? Hope is still there anyway.
Once the Kingdom came and we were accepted in, it never goes away. Our comfort isn’t solely dependent on our faithfulness to God, but on God’s faithfulness to us.
Even when we can’t keep open the door of hope, Jesus can. We may see a slammed door.
But Christ’s light can seep underneath even closed doors.
Christ as Hope
Christ lives in us so Hope lives with us. In our mourning, regardless of its source—whether it’s from a tragedy unfolding in front of us or from a sin we can’t beat down or from someone else’s poor decisions—Hope won’t abandon us.
Jesus will never say to us: “I’ll give you something to cry about!” Instead, Jesus cries with us. His companionship is our blessing.
We always have reason to hope. Because we always have Christ. And Christ is Hope.
That is comfort.
When has comfort evaded you? How do you find hope in pain? Please share in the comments.