In Boston in 1770, Perez Morton penned these words: “When Jesus wept, the falling tear in mercy flowed beyond all bound.  When Jesus groaned, a trembling fear seized all the guilty world around.”  Let’s hold onto those words: guilt, and mercy.  In that same year, fellow Bostonian William Billings set Morton’s words to music.  Their collaboration produced one of the earliest American hymns.  What made Jesus weep?  His tears were compassion, mercy “beyond all bound.”  Oh, this world!  Oh, these lives!

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (5:4).  Oh, this world.  Oh, these lives.  There is at least one thing about which each of us mourns.  In sorrow, we seek comfort.  Sometimes that can feel hard to find, slow to come.  Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, of Handmaid’s Tale fame, wrote: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.  Nobody said when.”  There is much to cause us grief.  Life can do a lot to us.  We mourn what we have lost: opportunities, wealth, health, youth, friends, family.  Yes, we also remember what we still have: we count our blessings.  But what’s taken can feel larger, better than what’s left.  The hollowed-out place in the heart can feel heavier than the abundance of grace that remains!  After a terrible blow, some spend the remainder of their lives in mourning.  Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, died in December of 1861.  Victoria died in January of 1901.  She spent the remaining four decades of her life in mourning for her dead husband.

I guess there’s something hopelessly romantic about that, but when we make our lives a long, slow, sad march to the grave, I fear we’re closing our ears to God’s voice.  I’m not saying that any of us get to say when another person has mourned long enough.  What I’m talking about is the importance of remembering that life in Christ offers more than mourning.  Christians are not gloomy people; neither are we naïve.  Guilt and mercy meet at the cross by grace.  There is beauty and power and hope in grace: grace heals.  Faith heals.  The scar is there.  The scar is real; sometimes it’s rather ugly.  My grandfather had scars from his cancer surgery and his heart surgery.  The tenderest scars, though, were those we didn’t often see: the accidental death of his father in 1932, when my grandfather was newly married; in 1968 the death of his mother, to whom he and his five brothers had devoted themselves after the death of their father; the unworthiness my grandfather felt with such intensity that he would not receive Communion—not because he didn’t want to but because he couldn’t bring his stained self to touch anything so holy and beautiful.  William Barclay paraphrases this Beatitude this way: “Blessed is the man who is desperately sorry for his own sin and his own unworthiness.”[1]  Another time, I’ll tell you about the Sunday when my sister, all of eight years old, finally led my weeping grandfather by the hand to the Communion rail.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”  All mourn.  Some cover it better than others.  Blessed are those who receive the comfort God provides, who beg God into their shattered hearts.  The comfort of God is Christ Jesus: the living, healing Word of God, empowered with the Holy Spirit.  Power is possibility.  Those who mourn can sometimes lose sight of possibility; they can stop wanting possibility at all, because the one thing they want in life is the one thing death has taken from them, or sin.  Like Queen Victoria for forty years, they entomb themselves in darkness of sorrow: no light, no possibility, no hope.

Christ is light, the light of the world.  Christ came to shine in the darkness.  Christ is our comfort.  It’s Barclay again who calls our attention to the root of this happy, holy word: comfort.  He points to that fort part; do you hear it?  Com-fort.  We hear that fort also in fortitude: strength, the strong place, the secure place.  A mighty fort-ress is our God.  The first part of the word, the com- in comfort, means with, or together with, or alongside.  The Comforter is the one who comes alongside us, to be together with us, strengthen us, and remind us of the believer’s security in an uncertain world.  Our security is God’s unfailing presence with us, His sure promise to us.  This world takes.  It can feel for some as if this life takes everything.  Job can tell us all about it.

Jesus walks alongside these ones, too.  The time for clambering, climbing out of the dark pit will come; Jesus holds us by the hand.  Beloved, the Spirit works in us for healing, for turning our hearts to God’s Word once more, for lifting our hands and eyes to heaven again, not with anger and blame, but with tearful prayer, and hope.  When Paul writes that God shall supply all our need, when Jeremiah by the Spirit writes that God knows the plans He has for us, to give us a future and a hope, these gentlest, strongest words offer the comfort of God.  This life is a vale of sorrows, touched and transformed by grace.  The world would have us forget all that, even as it inflicts its wounds.

Those who mourn know best the joy and peace of God’s comforting Word.  Those who do not mourn are not in search of this Word; God’s words of comfort do not seem especially precious to those who do not mourn.  As Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick” (Lk 5:31).

I’ve been speaking so far of the mourning that comes with the hurts life inflicts upon each of us.  We’ve all experienced them.  We know there will be more.  How to prepare ourselves?!  Not by giving ourselves over to anxiety—racking heart and soul over the myriad permutations of all that is out of our hands—but by continually surrendering ourselves to faith.  Take it to Jesus.  Have a little talk with Jesus.  God is faithful.  He will fulfill His merciful Word.  His Word is forgiveness; it is love; it is life.

The mourning Jesus mainly means is the sort of grief people feel when, like the Prodigal Son, they come to their senses and see the mess that their decisions, choices, and values have made of their lives and the lives of those around them, the mess they’ve made in the lives of those whom they love.  It’s the sort of grief sinners feel who know they are sinners and who no longer want to be sinners.  It is the grief after God’s own heart, that we feel as we take in the disaster that sin has made of the world: mass shootings, brutality toward children, exploitation, people singing the virtues of abortion, the deep disease that results in mutilation of ourselves, others, society, and culture, this deep disease that mutilates even the church.  Others call this progress, modern culture, modern values.  The values of human societies are always changing, not necessarily for the better.  God’s values do not change.

The Church Fathers in the early centuries understood all this right away.  This mourning of which Jesus speaks is mourning over our “sins and vices.”[2]  It is the profound sorrow “over the iniquity of the world.”[3]  Paul wrote to his grumpy, beloved Corinthians: “I will be grieved over many who have sinned earlier and have not repented of the impurity, sexual sin and debauchery in which they have indulged” (2 Cor 12:21).  Our keenest sorrow may well be for those who feel no sorrow, no guilt.  Mark tells us how, in Nazareth, among people Jesus had known all his life, he “was amazed at their lack of faith” (Mk 6:6).  We’re always blindest where pride rises highest: self-indulgence without consequence—you know, freedom.

And what good is sorrow?  How can sorrow be good?  Sorrow becomes good when it evokes compassion, prayer, the turn to God who can do all things and shall, according to His will, His mercy, and His Word in His time.  Sorrow becomes good when it moves us to some action of kindness, sympathy, when it puts us on our knees in more fervent prayer, when it causes us to open the Bible, that God’s Word might be opened to us.  Sorrow is good when it pulls us further into the embrace of faith and into the fellowship embrace Christ calls us to offer one another.  We do not encourage self-indulgence without consequence.  We encourage Christ: the embodiment of loving obedience.

Barclay writes, “The thing which really changes men is when they suddenly come up against something which opens their eyes to what sin is and to what sin does.”[4]  What sin is and does.  I’ve spoken often with you—too often?—about what sin is.  I’ve proposed several definitions, from tame to too vivid.  Maybe no one can truly come to an understanding of sin until he or she has seen—has felt!—what sin does.  Sin betrays.  Sin shatters.  Sin ruins.  Sin destroys.  Sin kills.  The wages of sin is death.  What sin is and what sin does . . . I can’t give you the actual examples: they’d shock the children.  For their sake, we try to hide sin, cover it over, and I’m not saying there is no wisdom or prudence in that, but we can get to hiding what sin is and does even from ourselves, and that has always been and will always be a problem for the church.  We’d really rather not call sin sin: I suppose it feels too much like judging; it just wouldn’t be Christian.  Better to live without judgment.  We’d rather not call it sin when we don’t see how it is.  But God sees and calls each thing, each action, each thought by its proper name.

Sin breaks things, not always intentionally but always thoroughly.  We see that supremely in Jesus on the cross.  I wish we were more easily able to feel the thoroughness of that brokenness!  The wounds, the blood, the dirt and sweat, the labored breathing.  Broken but not overcome.  Life not taken but given.  Broken for a higher purpose, the highest: salvation, redemption, life on God’s terms.  I mentioned Margaret Atwood and her riff on this beatitude.  Maybe she was being facetious; maybe she was being candid and raw about the nature of the wounds we carry: They shall be comforted.  Nobody said when.

One has been talking about when all along, pointing to it, calling us over, calling us into the comfort that is always already there.  When I survey the wondrous cross . . . It is that very brokenness—the blessing and benefit of his brokenness for us—that we can receive today, held out to us from this table, for our healing, to fill us, for life.  When will comfort come?  Beloved, he is here, right now, for you.  He wants to take you by the hand.

Now to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.

               [1] William Barclay.  Gospel of Matthew.  Vol. 1.  1956.  Daily Study Bible.  Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1975.  95.

               [2] Jerome.  Matthew 1-13.  Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture.  Thomas C. Oden, Gen. Ed.  Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity P, 2001.  81-82.

               [3] Chromatius.  Matthew 1-13.  82.

               [4] Barclay, 95.