Those Who Mourn

All summer at Bible Club, I have been teaching these famous words: “Blessed are those who mourn.”

This week, hugging children who have lost their mother, looking into the eyes of those who lost their brother, baking pink and purple cupcakes for the grandmother who lost her grandchild, I have had to think deeply about His words. 

Did He really mean what He said?

Can those who mourn be comforted?

They cannot be comforted with words, baked goods, hugs, or kind gestures. They cannot be comforted by platitudes, truisms, or traditions.

Mourning people know they need something that this world cannot supply. They ache for something that no one can give them. 

Perhaps, in their very need, we can see the root of why Jesus called them blessed. 

They know they need something. They will go looking to find it.

In the same sermon, which Jesus preached on a hillside to men and women, old and young, rich and poor, He said, “Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened to you.”

Only people who need something ask. Only those who know they are lacking something go seeking. Only those who are on a mission to find what they need will knock at the door.

The Tribal Council hosted a community prayer service at the powwow grounds this week to pray for the families of those who lost loved ones. A deacon from my church shared, “This is what we should be doing in difficult times- calling on God to help us and meet our needs.”

It is tempting to dull this aching need with food, entertainment, alcohol, or drugs; however, the dullness prevents the asking, seeking, and knocking that God intended for us to do at such times. The dullness always wears off, leaving sharper pain that has no earthly antidote. 

Mary and Martha both had the same grief when they first saw Jesus after the death of their brother: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

You can hear despair in their words. Where were you, Jesus? Why did you let this happen? Grief is sinking me.

They were so focused on death, but Jesus wanted to change that: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?”

These weren’t just empty words. Jesus wept with them, taking their sorrow as His own, and then, He brought Lazarus back to life. He conquered death- both on that day and for all eternity.

“The last enemy to be destroyed is death,” the Apostle Paul wrote later, and Jesus is the antidote, not just for grief, but also for death. 

He is how mourners will be comforted. He is the reason that even mourners can be called blessed.