35 Blessed are those who mourn

‘He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted… to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion.’ (Isa. 61:1,2)

‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.’ (Matt. 5:4)

THE suffering of the deep, intense sorrow and distress of grief is a universal experience which all people go through at some stage of their life.  It can have many different causes, all of which are significant experiences in a person’s life and which can sometimes be traumatic and devastating.  For example, the death of a loved one or of a child, particularly if this was sudden and unexpected, bringing on a time of bereavement and mourning; undergoing a divorce or the ending of a significant relationship; a child grieving the divorce of his/her parents; the onset of a serious medical condition; the loss of a long-held job, and so on.

The deep inward pain of grief is characterized by a very tender fragility of the person’s soul, and normally also by other observable factors which may include some or any of the following: weeping, unexpectedly breaking down in tears, deep sadness, mourning, despair, a feeling of disorientation, loss of appetite, sleeplessness, an inability to focus or concentrate, forgetfulness, prayerlessness, not looking after oneself properly, the loss of physical coordination, the inability to withstand other forms of stress, and so on.  Initial shock, pain, anger and depression are common stages through which grieving people pass.  Such people need the committed support of those who are close to them, both family and friends.

In particular, bereavement is the cause of a deep level of grief.  If marriage is the joining of two souls in one, then being bereaved of a loved one is to have that inner soul union ripped apart.  This is why it is so painful.  Indeed, the separation and trauma of bereavement is one of the most painful experiences that a person can go through in life.  It has been aptly described as having an amputation done on one’s inner soul.  Although normally one eventually accepts the change, yet one is never the same afterwards: something is missing (or rather someone, of course) and the emptiness is no longer filled, it is ongoing.

Jesus’ empathy with those who grieve

As I emphasize several times in this book, it is God’s purpose to walk with his people in living, personal relationship.  Not only does this mean that we can come to know him, it also means that he himself has chosen to enter into our feelings and to walk with us in the experience of our own sufferings.  He is a God who chooses to suffer together with his people.  He is an empathetic God.

This is a truth that we can perhaps miss.  When we are suffering grief, we tend to be very naturally consumed with our own feelings and suffering, and it is very easy for our inner soul to be dominated by the intensity of such depths of feeling.  We may even question or blame God for what happened, losing sight of the fact that he is still with us.  So we may find it perhaps impossible to grasp the fact that God also chooses to suffer this with us, much as a child cannot conceive the fact that, when s/he is suffering, his/her parent(s) also suffer empathetically together with their child.  The young child may be completely unaware of this parental empathy.

This empathetic nature of our God is unique to Christianity.  Other religious systems have no concept whatsoever of personal divine empathy to offer to people in their suffering, and so people are left to cope merely in the ‘strength’ of their own human weakness.  Christianity is the only faith which teaches and believes that in his love God empathizes with human suffering.

Our God is a God who has freely chosen to reveal himself and to enter into living, covenant relationship with his people and to walk with us through our lives, in everything that this means for us.  The consequence of this is that he himself empathetically feels our pain and suffering.  God is love (1 John 4:16) and love freely chooses to stand with another who is suffering.  This particular implication of our living relationship with God is summed up in verses such as the following (underlining my own for emphasis):

‘In all their distress he too was distressed.’ (Isa. 63:9)

‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.’ (Ps. 23:4)

This becomes even clearer when we consider the incarnation of Jesus the Son of God as a man.  In taking a fully human nature into union with himself and so identifying with humanity, God in Jesus opened himself up to understanding and feeling deeply within himself the suffering of the broken world into which he came.  He has chosen to identify with us in our humanity, to fellowship with us as we walk with him and therefore also to empathize with us in our sufferings.  As I like to put it myself, he understands ‘the groan of human existence.’

If this is not true, then we simply have a God who does not feel pain within himself, and who, in our times of trouble, cannot be anything other than distant from us.  He cannot truly be a God of love, and so our relationship with him is bound to fail at the time we need it the most, and our faith will prove to be unable to take us through the whole of life.  But no!  Jesus ‘shared in [our] humanity’ and was ‘made like his brothers in every way’ (Heb. 2:14,17), so, as our faithful high priest, he can ‘sympathize with our weaknesses’ and is ‘touched with the feeling of our infirmities’ (Heb. 4:15 NIV and AV).  He understands our lives through and through because he himself is fully human.

      Jesus, the author of our salvation, was made perfect (as a Saviour) through suffering himself (Heb. 2:10).  At some stage before he began his ministry, it seems that he would almost certainly have suffered and grieved the loss of Joseph whom he would have been very close to and who had brought him up as a child. Furthermore, as we saw in chapter 11, he suffered the grief of his own sufferings in the events of the cross.  He was (and still is) a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering and acquainted with grief (Isa. 53:3).

As we saw in chapter 4, the passage in Isaiah 61:1-3 shows us the heart of the ministry of Jesus, to come intentionally as the Son of Man into the brokenness and suffering of the ‘warp and woof’ of human experience, bringing the transforming comfort and provision of the life-giving and restoring presence of God into the very places of the human heart where there is grief, mourning and despair.  Such restoration is a specific purpose of his ministry.  He bore our griefs and carried our sorrows, so that we may be healed (Isa. 53:4).

For example, when Jesus was faced with crowds of sick people, we are told that he experienced a deep, involuntary sigh of compassion within himself which moved him to bring healing to them (Matt. 14:14).  Furthermore, when Lazarus, one of his own close friends had died and he was later face to face with the bereaved family members and felt their grief, as well as seeing their tears and hearing their words, Scripture records that Jesus was ‘deeply moved in spirit and troubled’ and that he wept with them (John 11:3,33,35; cf. Rom. 12:15).

It is also true that Jesus understands the state of death, again through personal experience.  The apostle Paul reminds us of the basic facts of the gospel, vis. that Jesus died for our sins, was buried, and then was raised again on the third day (1 Cor. 15:3-4).  So Jesus understands and knows for himself the state of death, because he entered into it and experienced it for himself for three days.

This is why he is always so subjectively close to us when we go through the experience of losing a close loved one.  He walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death (Ps. 23:4) and empathizes with the inner pain and grief we feel, so he carries us through it in his strength.  He brings the very light of God into the pain and darkness of death, and his presence into the absence we feel inwardly.  Indeed, many believers can testify that they have subjectively known and experienced ‘the peace of God which transcends all understanding’ (Phil. 4:6-7) deep within their hearts in the very midst of their grief at such times.

Knowing the Lord’s subjective closeness in such a time is one of the greatest blessings of the Christian life.  This is why I am fond of reminding believers that they should never be afraid of death.  Our Saviour has already been into it and been raised out from it.  So, as we go through the loss of a loved one, or as we approach that time for ourselves, we have One who will accompany us and pass into it with us (Ps. 23:4) and will be there with us on the other side of it.

Inward disclosure is the key to experiencing God’s comfort

The words of the beatitude in Matthew 5:4 ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted’ were never purposed by God to be a well-meaning platitude spoken to believers when they are in times of mourning.  He does not expect believers to struggle to somehow derive crumbs of comfort from nice-sounding words as they go through grief and mourning unable to cope in the so-called ‘strength’ of their own human weakness.  No!  The meaning of this beatitude is that God designs and purposes specifically for his comfort to minister inwardly and deeply to those who are in grief or mourning, i.e. when God sees believers mourning, he intentionally desires to pour his strengthening grace and comfort into their heart and life.  The key to experiencing this, as always, is living relationship and fellowship with God.

As I say several times in this book, the key to knowing the inward strengthening of the grace of God when we have needs in our life as believers, is opening ourselves up and disclosing the vulnerability of the inward need of our heart to God in prayer:

‘O LORD, you have searched me and you know me…  Search me, O God, and know my heart…’ (Ps. 139:1,23)

Opening ourselves up to God allows the Holy Spirit (who is the Comforter) to touch our hearts and pour his comforting grace into the tender fragility and vulnerability of our very point of need (see Heb. 4:12,16).  It is through our fellowship with him that we receive inward strength, comfort and the grace of healing (cf. Isa. 53:5).  When Martha came to Jesus, expressing her grief over the death of her brother Lazarus, he spoke his famous words ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ directly into her heart (cf. John 11:20-27).  They were words of living faith spoken deeply into the presence of her grief and loss bringing hope to her.

It is possible for believers to make the mistake of giving place to their inward feelings of grief and their (as yet unanswered) questions in such a way that can effectively distance them from the life-giving grace and comfort of God.  Giving place, and continuing to give place, to the heaviness of the inward feelings of grief in their soul, and allowing these to dominate the life of the Holy Spirit in their spirit, means that they may not then seek God for the strengthening grace that could be theirs in their time of need (Heb. 4:16).  They may then continue, over the long-term, to question God or even blame him for the death of their loved one, and not receive the very grace that is purposed to strengthen and comfort them.

In such times, even though our feelings of grief are indeed very real and deep, yet we should be careful not to distance ourselves, in anger, bitterness and questioning, from the source of the very grace, love and comfort we need.  Our human weakness is not enough to take us through such times, and relying by default only on this, condemns us to continuing with our issue of mourning, grief and endless unanswered questions.  If we keep on in this way, it may mean that we give place to a spirit of grief in our life.

The Father of compassion and the God of all comfort

The experience of going through a season of grief, and of coming to terms in particular with the loss of a loved one, can often last for many months.  The following words from an anonymous posting on Facebook which I saw recently sum it up aptly: ‘Grief never ends… but it changes.  It’s a passage, not a place to stay.  Grief is not a sign of weakness, nor a lack of faith…  It is the price of love.’

Although the Lord can and does subjectively minister his comfort to us through such seasons, yet, because of the heaviness and pain of the feelings of grief, it may be that a direct sense of God’s presence seems to be hidden from us for a while, and perhaps again from time to time as waves of loneliness, missing our loved one and consequently feeling low, hit us from time to time.  So it is important that, as believers, we support and pray for and with one another through such times of grieving.  As the Scriptures say, he is

‘the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.’

(2 Cor. 1:3-4)

As we receive the prayerful and practical support of other trusted believers in such times, and as we maintain a heart attitude of trust and faith in the midst of our inner fragility and brokenness, the Holy Spirit can inwardly strengthen us through his grace (Heb. 4:16).  As I said above, many believers can testify that they have subjectively known and experienced ‘the peace of God which transcends all understanding’ (Phil. 4:6-7) deep within their heart in the midst of their time of grief.

Opening ourselves up to the Holy Spirit, and allowing him to continue to minister to us through such times, can bring about a realization of the ministry of Isaiah 61:1-3 in our life, that, in place of our broken-heartedness, mourning, grieving and despair, we begin to experience a binding up of our inner wound, we find the provision and comfort we need, and we begin to enjoy once again the oil of gladness and to wear a garment of praise and a crown of beauty instead of our ashes.

From Keys to Victory.