Comfort for the Mourning (Matthew 5:4)

Should a Christian always be joyful? Should a Christian never be joyful? Can he be joyful and mournful at the same time? Paul was when he described himself as sorrowful yet always rejoicing. The people that Peter wrote to in his first letter are described as those ‘rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials’ (1 Pet. 1:6). So it is possible for Christians to have sorrow and joy at the same time and for a prolonged time.

An unusual incident is described in Ezra 3. The returnees from Babylon had laid the foundation for the new temple and were marked by joy at this sign of progress whereas those who could remember the previous temple built by Solomon were distressed. The outcome was that ‘the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping, for the people shouted with a great shout, and the sound was heard far away’ (Ezra 3:13). Maybe that is the way it often is with God’s people. Recollection of better days and small steps of recovery conflict. But God saw fit to include the incident in his Word because both responses pleased him.

Matthew Henry makes two interesting comments on this verse in Matthew 5. First, he says that ‘Christ, who was himself a great mourner, says, Blessed are the mourners.’ Isaiah predicted of Jesus that he would be the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. We have recorded instances of when Jesus mourned. He wept at the tomb of Lazarus even although he knew that he was about to raise him from the dead. He wept over the city of Jerusalem because of its refusal to take the grace he offered to them. Jesus saw beautiful scenery, but he would know that it was a creation that had been cursed at the beginning. Jesus on his earthly journey would never have spoken to a human who was sinless. Those kind of details must have grieved him deeply.

The second point that Henry makes is that we can distinguish different kinds of mourning, and helps us understand which kind is blessed. Henry identifies three kinds of mourning. First, ‘there is a sinful mourning, which is an enemy to blessedness – the sorrow of the world; despairing melancholy upon a spiritual account, and disconsolate grief upon a temporal account.’ 

Second, says Henry, ‘There is a natural mourning, which may prove a friend to blessedness, by the grace of God working with it, and sanctifying the afflictions to us, for which we mourn.’ I suppose an example of this could be the death of a family member who was a believer. While the other members grieve at the passing, they think about where her soul has gone and begin to desire the same destiny for themselves, and in that scenario  natural mourning leads them to repentance and faith in Christ. 

The third kind of sorrow Henry calls ‘a gracious mourning, which qualifies for blessedness, an habitual seriousness, the mind mortified to mirth, and an actual sorrow.’ This is the kind of mourning that Jesus had in mind when he gave the beatitude. Paul calls it a godly sorrow that does not need to be repented of. So we can think it about briefly.

Why should Christians be sad?

There is one basic reason for why Christians should have sorrow and that is because they are marked by repentance from the onset of their Christian life. Repentance by definition includes sorrow for the sins that a person has committed before they were converted. There is more than one reason as to why a person repents of their sin. One is that the Holy Spirit reveals to them that they have broken the law of God and fallen short of his requirements. While repentance is more than regret, it does include regret for one’s sins. 

A second reason for sorrow at conversion is that they focus on Jesus as he suffered on the cross. This consideration was predicted by the prophet Zechariah when he foretold that sinners ‘when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn’ (Zech. 12:10). Such repentance, while it can be very strong, is also very sweet.

So sorrow is present when a person commences the Christian life and it continues to be present while he lives the Christian life. Four areas are often identified as contributing to this sense of sorrow. 

First, there is the individual’s own experience as they find out how sinful they are and can be, and how they undergo divine chastisement as a consequence. They can find that the sense of God’s gracious presence has diminished, that he has withdrawn from them because they have grieved the Spirit. The Bible no longer speaks to them as it used to do, and they grieve when that happens.

A second reason that makes them mourn is the powerlessness and ineffectiveness of the church. He does not do this by using the words ‘you’ and ‘they’, as if the problem was only caused by others. Instead, he is like godly Daniel when he prayed in Daniel 9 about the sins of Israel, and in his prayer he used the first person plural because he identified himself with the declension that had occurred. We find similar distress in many of the psalms in times when backsliding occurs. Backsliding is marked by degrees. Some backslide very quickly and very far while others backslide slowly and may not seem to be doing so. But if we are not making progress we are going back, and the realisation of that makes believers sad.

But it is not only the weakness of the church that saddens believers. They also have the sorrow of sympathy for fellow-Christians as they suffer, including for those who suffer persecution for the faith. I saw a statistic that calculates that a Christian is martyred every five minutes, which means fourteen are slain throughout the world during our service.

Think of the occasion when Paul gathered the elders of the church in Ephesus to meet with him at Miletus. Part of his message was that he would not be there again. He reminded them of his manner when he was with them, ‘that for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish every one with tears’ (Acts 20:31). Over a thousand days and a thousand nights of non-stop tears. After he finished speaking, we are told that ‘there was much weeping on the part of all; they embraced Paul and kissed him, being sorrowful most of all because of the word he had spoken, that they would not see his face again’ (Acts 20:37-38).

Another reason for spiritual mourning is the state of society. The unknown author of Psalm 119 stated that rivers of waters ran down his eyes because people kept not God’s law. I recall reading a biography of a mission worker whom a colleague found weeping and saying to God, ‘The sin of this city is breaking my heart.’ The psalmist complained to God and said to him, ‘My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?”’ (Ps. 42:3).

Connected to the above is the seeming ineffectiveness of the gospel. Paul had sorrow and continual anguish in his heart because his fellow countrymen despised the gospel. He told the Philippians that he was shedding tears as he wrote to them about those who were the enemies of the cross of Christ. It is a thought to wonder if the first copy of the letter to the Philippians was stained by the tears of the great apostle. No doubt, we have heard story about the visitor to Dundee who asked the beadle about the secret of McCheyne’s success. The visitor was told to sit at McCheyne’s desk, put his elbows on it, put his face into his hands and weep.

The comfort promised

It is a question, why should tears bring comfort?  Maybe it is because they reveal we are in earnest about desires for God’s glory, for the name of the Saviour to be honoured. Perhaps it is because they can indicate the presence of the Holy Spirit in a special way. Can you recall when the cloths at the Lord’s Table were wet because of the tears that flowed as believers remembered their Saviour?

Tears are an indication of Christlikeness, an imitation of how he responded when he was here in this vale of tears. Is it not curious that Jesus did not stifle his tears at the tomb of Lazarus? Why was he weeping there? He is about to reveal his power and raise Lazarus from the dead. Surely, that should be a moment for singing, of telling the crowd that they are about to see an astonishing miracle. Was he only weeping because he saw the weeping of the mourners? Was he not also weeping because he knew the miracle would have little effect on those who observed it? Christlikeness involves discovering the heart of Christ, and there is comfort from heaven for those who find it. 

Tears are collected by God and put in his bottle. God observed the tears of Hagar and sent her a message of comfort. God noticed the tears of Hannah and sent here a message of comfort through Eli the priest. There are numerous examples of others whose tears were noted by God. Why does God keep them in his bottle? A reason can be found in Revelation 7:17 where John says about believers in heaven that ‘God will wipe away every tear from their eyes’. We should note that he mentions tears in the singular, suggesting that God will deal with whatever caused each tear in their Christian experience. That is one aspect of the future comfort promised by Jesus. There are other aspects such as meeting when Jesus returns with those believers we knew in this life, as Paul mentioned to the Thessalonians when explaining to them what would happen on that great day.

Yet we know that comfort is not limited to the after life but is also to be found in this life. No doubt, there is a wide range of comforts because God is called the God of all comfort. The comfort we need when we sin is the certainty of forgiveness and restoration. The comfort we need when we pray for conversions is given when they happen, but we also have the comfort of his promises as we continue to pray. The comfort we desire when we are attacked by the arrows of the devil is to experience the truth of the statement that greater is he that is in us that he that is in the world. There are many times when we need comfort, but as Spurgeon pointed out, ‘Our griefs are blessed, for they are our points of contact with the divine Comforter.’

What should we do with our comforts? We should share them, says Paul in 2 Corinthians, telling others about how God has helped us. We should sanctify them by using them as means of getting closer to God – each one of them says that we should come to God for more. We should value them because in a beautiful way they show that God cares for us. Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.