Blessed are those who Mourn // Matthew 5:4

INTRODUCTION

Sermon on the Mount = Vision of the Upside-Down Kingdom of God

Beatitudes — series of counter-intuitive, counter-cultural commendations of the good life; commends those who the world would call “losers and wimps” (France)

Pronouncement of “blessing” ≠ good translation of the Greek makarios — closer to happy, fortunate, congratulations, good on ya! Feels strange in light of what Jesus calls blessed.

Second Beatitude — Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted

Illus. Wrong thing to say in a receiving line at a funeral — Congratulations! Good on ya!

Big Idea: In God’s upside-down Kingdom, mourning is not a defect of the happy life but a blessing.

EXEGESIS // Matthew 5:4

ONE // The Blessing of Mourning

What is mourning?

Context — Encouragement to the exiled people of God living in Babylonian captivity (Isaiah 61) about a coming restoration and renewal of God’s people; these who are mourning will be comforted

Isaiah 61:1-3 “The Spirit of the Lord God is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and freedom to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of our God’s vengeance; to comfort all who mourn, to provide for those who mourn in Zion; to give them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, festive oil instead of mourning, and splendid clothes instead of despair. And they will be called righteous trees, planted by the Lord to glorify him.”

Mourning from this context — Sorrow for the terrible consequences of Israel’s sin (personal and corporate) and because of that sorrow, a posture of heart that is contrite and repentant; to these people, God will bring about comfort

Carson — mourning is the “emotional counterpart to poverty of spirit” — it recognizes the spiritual bankruptcy of our sinful condition and invites us to be in accordance with that reality through a humble posture of repentance

Mourning in the context of the Beatitudes — Jesus says that this posture of brokenness for sin is necessary to live the good life, but that runs completely counter to the way of the world

Every impulse we have is to obfuscate, hide, and shift the blame about our own sin; we might even be preoccupied with all the evil that is “out there” but never contend with what is “in here”

Jesus says blessed are not those who make themselves appear to have no sin and therefore no need for grief, but rather blessed are those who reckon with that grief head on and mourn.

Carson — two dimensions: personal sin and effects of sin

Dimension #1 — Mourning for personal sin

“At the individual level, this mourning is a personal grief over personal sin. This is the mourning experienced by a man who begins to recognize the blackness of his sin, the more he is exposed to the purity of God.” (D.A. Carson)

Recognition that we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Rom 3:23) and that our sins have separated us from God (Isa 59:2) — on our own we are enslaved to sin (Rom 6:20) in bondage to corruption (Rom 8:21); that in our sin we are helplessly bound to making a wreckage of our lives and our world

Mourning is not disputing this, but leaning into it — recognizing before the holiness of God, we are in trouble and there is nothing good in us that can satisfy, set us free, or cause us to flourish.

Illus. Reformed people always talking about sin — following after Jesus requires that we square up to our sin and recognize who we are; in fact, the greater the delta between our understanding of the holiness of God and our realization of our own sin, the greater will our humility grow as we understand our need for a Savior; this puts us at exactly the posture we need to follow Jesus, recognizing that there is nothing within us worth trusting, promoting, or pursuing, but that all is to be set aside for the sake of coming after Jesus

Dimension #2 — Mourning for the brokenness in the world (social evils and oppression — Blomberg)

How that impacts the church — recognize “their situation in the world is generally one of disadvantage” (France)

Often times, the church wants to exchange a posture of mourning for one of power; to trade the disadvantage of our upside-down way of being in the world for one of privilege, comfort, and prosperity

Resisting this reality is senseless; it’s a reality of belonging to a Kingdom is not of this world (Jn 18:36)

Resisting causes us to fall into all kinds of distortions — May we not become foolish like Peter holding the ear of the soldiers come to arrest Jesus before his crucifixion saying “God we claimed the power! What do you want to do now?”

Recognize God is flourishing a counter-culture in his church; because of the good news, what seems like failure, defeat, and loser-theology is actually blessing

How can mourners be blessed?

Subverts our expectation — every other worldview says that happiness is about the absence of grief; part of a life lived up and to the right is the ability to insulate ourselves from anything that grieves us

Hauerwas — only possible if the world is beginning to be transformed through Jesus; when we try to disconnect the ethics of the Kingdom from the King it seems illogical, immoral, and inconvenient — quickly we will dispense with them

Apart from the person of Jesus and his proclamation — these commendations are senseless; backwards way of living that will gain you nothing and cost you everything

But if Jesus is reigning and his Kingdom is coming and if this world is truly passing away, then perhaps there is something of wisdom to align ourselves with Him.

Because of this reality that the categories of sin and righteousness make sense — because of these, Jesus can proclaim a blessing on those who mourn and are not happy in their sin or with the sin of the world despite what it costs and how it sets us back in the course of operations in the world

“Godly mourning is better than carnal rejoicing.” (William S. Plumer)

Application — Mourning isn’t a defect of the otherwise happy life. Sin is the defect of a happy life; mourning is recognizing what is reality. Lean into your mourning rather than avoiding it; expose yourself to vulnerability you’d rather protect yourself against and you will receive divine comfort.

Application — We have to learn what to do with mourners

Jesus who himself is a “man of sorrows… acquainted with grief” would stick out like a sore thumb in our gatherings (Isa 53:3)

In our culture, mourning feels like a wet blanket on our good time. We don’t like to sit in someone’s discomfort or despair isn’t mindlessly wallowing in self-pity; it is the sacred liturgy of acknowledging what is broken in ourselves in and in the world; it is from the depths of our inner being a longing for redemption that only Christ can fill; it is deeply foolish to rid ourselves of these people in favor of something a bit more fun.

Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and His Confrontation with the World: An Exposition of Matthew 5–10 The Beatitudes, 5:3–10

But there can also be a mourning stimulated by broader considerations. Sometimes the sin of this world, the lack of integrity, the injustice, the cruelty, the cheapness, the selfishness, all pile onto the consciousness of a sensitive man and make him weep. Most of us would prefer merely to condemn. We are prepared to walk with Jesus through

TWO // The Promise of Comfort

Jesus fulfills the promise made in Isa 61:1-3

Jesus is the promise of God to deliver, restore, and redeem his people realized. The eschatological blessing of comfort for the mourning has arrived with the inaugurating work of Christ and there is more to come.

“Perhaps no beatitude is more christocentric than Jesus’s commendation of those who mourn, for they are, like him, prepared to live in the world renouncing what the world calls happiness and even peace.” (Bonhoeffer)

Comfort in this life

Mourning is the soil which the divine comfort of takes root

Knowing that in Jesus we are fully known, fully accepted, and fully loved — “he saved us—not by works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy—through the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit. He poured out his Spirit on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior so that, having been justified by his grace, we may become heirs with the hope of eternal life.” (Titus 3:5-7)

Brokenness over our sin or the effects of sin does not lead us to despair, but instead towards profound hopefulness in the redeeming work of Christ

We are grounded in the hope that Jesus has defeated death and with the suffering it brings — “he has swallowed up death once and for all, the Lord God will wipe away the tears from every face and remove his people’s disgrace from the whole earth, for the Lord has spoken.” (Isa 25:8)

Comfort in the age to come

Things will not be as they are

“For those who, as God’s people, find their current situation intolerable and incomprehensible, there are better times ahead.” (France)

“Weeping may stay overnight, but there is joy in the morning.” (Ps 30:5)

“God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” (Rev 7:17)

Application — We all experience grief. Where are you seeking comfort? (seeking the gift apart from the Giver)

Medicating — I can find comfort by numbing myself to grief

Avoiding — I can find comfort by ignoring my grief

Tower-building — I can find comfort by overcoming my grief through my own power and achievement

Escaping — I can find comfort by distracting myself from grief

Blaming — I can find comfort by explaining away grief

Conclusion — If we do these things, we miss the very means by which God gives his grace through comfort

APPLICATION