BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN

BLESSED ARE THEY THAT MOURN

 

“Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.”  Matt. 4:4

Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. The afflicted, the weeping, those who feel disgust for themselves and pity for the world, who do not live in the prostrate stupidity of everyday life, who mourn over their own unhappiness and that of their brothers, who grieve over failures, over the blind­ness which delays the victory of light—because light for men cannot come from the sky if their own eyes do not reflect it —who grieve over the remoteness of that righteousness dreamed of again and again, promised a thousand times, and yet always further away through our fault and every one's fault; those who mourn over an offense received instead of in­creasing the wrong by revenge, and who weep over the wrong they have done and over the good they might have done and did not; those who care little about the loss of a visible treas­ure but strain after the invisible treasure; those who mourn, hasten with their tears the day of grace, and it is right that they shall someday be comforted.

Oxymoron-happy mourners "They that mourn." And here the evangelistic value is at once manifest. The first matter is initial.

         The man poor in spirit is so because he has learned his own incompetence, his own unworthiness; because he is conscious of his own failure, conscious that he cannot of himself take hold upon all the ideals that are being represented to him by the King. This man mourns over his own sin, over his own failure. This is the mourning intended. Jesus says, "They shall be comforted." The great word "comforted" is related to the word that Jesus used when He promised the coming of the Holy Spirit. The Comforter disannuls orphanage, takes hold of a man in his sorrow and assuages it, heals it. The poor in spirit, submitting to the Throne, and to the government of the King, is troubled immediately; he mourns over sin, and incompetence, and failure. That soul is comforted with the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, the very life and soul of the Kingdom.