Blessed are Those Who Mourn - Steve Stewart

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

I have been thinking about this second beatitude a lot over the past couple of months. It is about both identification and promise. Jesus, after all, mourned¬¬-––He mourned over Jerusalem that rejected Him; He sighed over the suffering of the deaf man; famously, He wept over the pain that Lazarus’ death caused his family and friends.

Significantly, Jesus promised that a time of comfort was coming. It seems to me that He was speaking both of the temporal and eternal. Paul declared that the Lord is “the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles” (2 Cor 1:3-4). The Psalms repeatedly assert that when we turn to the Lord in our troubles, He comforts and sustains us. But I believe there is a deeper promise in the second beatitude that points our hearts to an ultimate resolution, an eternal solace, contentment and satisfaction.

I need this beatitude because, increasingly, I am aware that, at a deep and quiet level, I am mourning. 

At the core of this mourning is the reality that as a follower of Christ and His Kingdom, I am now an alien and stranger in this world. In the famous “faith chapter”, the writer to the Hebrews said that the Old Testament heroes realized this and lived accordingly (Heb 11:13). Repeatedly, Peter addressed the church as “strangers in the world”, even reminding them to embrace this (1 Pe 1:17; 2:11). If we are going to truly follow Jesus’ steps as His disciples, then alienation will mark our lives. The great 19th C preacher, Charles Spurgeon, wrote: “How settled soever their condition be, yet this is the temper of the saints upon earth––to count themselves but strangers.” 

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