Chapter 42
Good Monday Morning to this week 42 of 2021
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
In the last five years of writing this blog these short Monday Messages we have mourned very many loved ones from teenagers to parents and many other loved ones. I sometimes sent out a message tackling some theological issue or even some political issue – to later find out that you were mourning the passing of a loved one.
I started writing 2016 after the passing of my Mum. Now I write today with the passing of Dad last week. Unexpected, in sort of rush, quickly he left us last Tuesday. His life was well lived, always ready for change and a new beginning. Now he started the next journey to a place he preached about all his life, actually his last sermon is only 4 weeks back.
We don’t only mourn our loved ones. We mourn homes, jobs, relationships, friendships, old times, youth, strength and much more.
As you realise, the best book I read this year was the biography of Eugene Peterson, yet even better than his biography is the paraphrased Bible he wrote: The Message. Also this verse takes on much more meaning or new aspects of the whole verse and idea of Jesus.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Matthew 5.4 NIV
You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you. The Message
Jamieson Brown puts it this way in his commentary;
This “mourning” must not be taken loosely for that feeling under pressure of the ills of life, nor for sorrow on account of failure. Evidently it is that entire feeling which the sense of our spiritual poverty “having lost what is dear to us” and so the second beatitude is but the complement of the first. The one is the intellectual, the other the emotional aspect of the same thing. It is part of our spirit that says, “I am undone”. Faith according to these verses, is neither a set of intellectual convictions nor a bundle of emotional feelings, but a compound of both. These two beatitudes cohere. The mourners shall be “comforted.” Even now they get beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. Sowing in tears, they reap even here in joy. Still, all present comfort, even the best, is partial, interrupted, short-lived. But the days of our mourning shall soon be ended, and then God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes. Then, in the fullest sense, shall the mourners be “comforted.”
You too may feel undone this morning.
May you be embraced by the One most dear to you!
Philemon