November 2022
‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted’
Matthew 5.4 (RSV) [See also: Matthew 3.16 Acts 7.56 Acts 10.11 Revelation 4.1].
This teaching, in the Sermon on
the Mount, comes after Matthew had set the scene for who Jesus is - the
Messiah, the promised one.
So it’s a Dominical saying.
Spoken first to disciples, then written in the last quarter of the first
century to bed down ‘a new social unit, new norms, new authority’. The context
the Kingdom of God, bringing earth and heaven together.
This particular saying is an echo
from the book of Isaiah chapter 61. Jesus takes up the mantle to himself, ‘the
Spirit of the Lord is upon me’. Each Beatitude has half as a community present
(in this case those who mourn) and the communities future (comfort is offered).
There are 122 references to
mourning in the Bible, mostly in the Old Testament. Mourning comes in a variety
of forms. For bereavement yes, but also abuse, failure, loneliness,
disappointment. There is also the half-truth, innuendo, fear, helplessness as
well as hopelessness.
Into all these situations Jesus
says Blessed, offers a promise, he is what the Old Testament called the
Consolation of Israel. Blessing is an antidote to spiritual bankruptcy. It’s
offered to those in any kind of grief.
Our world has been coming through
a very particular grief, the Pandemic. It has raised particular questions about
our pleasure mad, entertainment culture. For the last two, three years we have
been reminded of our eternal context. We have needed the promise of Jesus and
the comfort of one another.
In this Remembrance month, ‘as
poppies fall, as heads bow’, we take the divine promise of comfort, the promise
of comfort ‘as day breaks’*, an eternal context.
*from
the poem ‘I remember’ by the Irish poet Paul Gilmore.