Mourning

Matthew 5:4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

We can mourn for many things in this life.  Of course, we mourn when we lose a loved one.  We mourn when something beautiful comes to an end.  We mourn over the state of the world: war, death, disease, crime, pollution, disaster, hatred, misery.  And the unspoken promise in each of these Beatitudes is that God is the one who blesses us.  In this case, God will comfort us.  We see his compassion when Jesus wept at Lazarus’ grave.  He was not sad because his friend was dead.  He knew he was about to bring him back from the dead.  He was moved to tears because of the evident pain of Mary and Martha.  It is good and right to mourn in all these ways.

However, in the context of the Sermon, I believe Jesus would encourage us to mourn for our sin.  This blessing builds directly on the preceding one, “blessed are the poor in spirit.”  When we make a mistake, hurt someone, how we react to that reveals our relationship with God and with that person.  It is one thing to admit we were wrong and another to work to repair that relationship.  

"Repent” means to change direction, to turn back to the right path.  In Tolkien’s Hobbit, the path through Mirkwood was straight and easy to see, but Bilbo and his Dwarf companions found they were unable to stay on it.  They did not see any harm in going off the path just a few steps.  

Further on in the Sermon, in Matthew 7:13-14, Jesus warns, “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”  

If we sin and escape without real consequences, we are likely to repeat that behavior, finding ourselves on the road to destruction without realizing it until it is too late. And like Bilbo, by the time we do see it, we can’t find the path again.  Often, we forget that it is even wrong.  We drive our cars with hardly a thought to the pollution or the deer and squirrels we leave as roadkill.  We buy our food wrapped in plastic and ingest microplastic that is slowly killing us, the “recycled” bottles now float like a malignant continent somewhere in the Pacific, strangling dolphins and tortoises.  We make sarcastic jokes at our loved one’s expense and years later, wonder “whatever happened to our old friend?”

It is a far better thing to mourn for our behavior, for only then will change come.  But can we change?