The passage: Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. (Matthew v. 4.)
Grief, sorrow, pain of heart, mourning is no wall between man and God. It does not block God’s light from a man’s soul; the Lord congratulates those who mourn. There is no evil in sorrow. It is not an essential good, a good in itself like love, but it mixes with any good and opens the heart’s door to any good. More sorrowful than joyful people are always standing at the everlasting doors into the presence of the Most High. Joy is by nature more divine than sorrow: man must sorrow and God shares it, but in himself God is not sorrowful, and the glad creator never made man for sorrow, which is only a stormy strait on the way to his ocean of peace; he “makes the joy the last in every song.” Still, a man in sorrow is generally far nearer God than a man in joy: gladness may make him forget to give thanks, but misery drives him to prayer. For we are not yet; we are only becoming. A day will dawn when every moment lifts our hearts Godward and we will hardly need to raise them. For now the house of prayer has two door-keepers, and Sorrow is quicker to open than her grandson Joy.
The happy child runs farther afield; the hurt child turns for home. The weeper sits down by the gate, and the lord of life draws near from within. God does not love sorrow, yet he is glad to see a man sorrowful, because then the man leaves his heavenward door on the latch, and God can enter to part him from whatever makes the sorrow a welcome sight. When Ephraim bemoans himself, he is a pleasant child. Sorrow is such good medicine, so powerful to kill the moths that devour the human heart, that the Lord congratulates a man on his sadness. Grief is ill-favoured, but she is Love’s own child, and her mother loves her.
The promise to mourners is not the kingdom of heaven but that their mourning shall end. To mourn is not to fight evil, only to miss what is good, so it is not an essential heavenly condition like poorness of spirit or meekness. No one will carry mourning into heaven; if he does, it will soon turn to joy, or to redemptive action, which leads to joy.
Mourning is a canker-bitten blossom on the rose-tree of love. Is there any real mourning that does not have love for its root? Men mourn because they love. All human feeling is fashioned from love: love shaped by faith is hope; love shaped by wrong is anger, though pure of sin; love invaded by loss is grief.
The garment of mourning is most often a winding-sheet; the death of the loved is the chief cause of the world’s mourning. The Greek word used here generally means those who mourn for the dead. It is not used only so in the New Testament, nor do I think it is here: there are griefs far sorer than death and harder to comfort, even for God. Still, it may please us that the promise may apply especially to those who mourn because their loved ones are beyond sight and the reach of their cry. For divine love their sorrow is a small matter, easily met. The father whose elder son is with him but whose younger is in a far country wasting his substance in riotous living is unspeakably more to be pitied, and harder to help, than a father whose two sons both lie in the sleep of death.
Much of what is called comfort is worthless, and I would not care to comfort anyone who could be comforted by it. Time may bring forgetfulness, new scenes may lead thought from the vanished, new loves may bury grief in the grave of the old; such consolation could never have crossed the mind of Jesus. Would The Truth call a man blessed because his pain would eventually leave him, no better off than before and certainly poorer, with the beloved, the sorrow and the love behind the sorrow all gone? Blessed of God because restored to an absence of sorrow? Such a God would be fitly adored only where no heart worshipped in spirit and in truth.
Someone may say: “The Lord means, of course, that the mourners’ comfort will be the restoration of what they have lost. He means, ‘Blessed are you although you mourn, for your sorrow will be turned into joy.’”
Happy are those whom nothing less than restoration will comfort! But would restoration be comfort enough for the heart of Jesus to give? Was ever love so deep and pure as to be good enough for him? And if the parted two had so loved, would the mere return of what he once had be reason enough to call the man blessed now, in the midnight of his loss, knowing nothing of his deliverance? To call a man blessed in sorrow because of something to be given him surely implies something better than he had before. Blessed is a strong word, and in the mouth of Jesus means all it can mean; a merely temporary interruption of his blessedness would hardly justify it. Can his saying mean less than: “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted with a bliss well worth all the pain of the medicinal sorrow”? And surely the man is blessed because of his mourning, not in spite of it: it is part of the Lord’s ground, the present means by which the consolation becomes possible. I do not think the Lord would call a man blessed merely for going to be restored to a former, far from perfect bliss. He congratulated the mourners on their grief because he saw the glory of the coming comfort and the immeasurably greater joy to which the sorrow was leading them. By greater I do not mean other: I mean the same bliss, divinely enlarged and purified, passed again through the hands of the creative Perfection. The Lord knew the whole history of love and loss, and saw the winged Love discrowning the skeleton Fear throughout the universe. God’s comfort must be larger than man’s grief, or there would be gaps in his Godhood; mere restoration would leave a barren hiatus in the development of his children.
But alas, what a pinched hope most who call themselves the Lord’s disciples draw from their notions of his teaching! No wonder they dread death as the one thing to avoid and lament for ever; who would leave even the windowless hut of sorrow for the poor mean place they imagine the Father’s house to be? Many do not even expect to know their friends there, or tell one face from another in the holy assembly. A fine saviour their Jesus is, to hold out such a word of darkness to our world of sorrow! Is the Lord such as they believe him? “Good-bye, then, good Master!” cries the human heart. “I thought you could save me, but you cannot. If you save the part of us that can sin and let the part that can love sink into hopeless perdition, you are not he who should come; I look for another! Your father is not my father. Ah, to whom shall we go? This Jesus has not the words of eternal life, and the universe is dark as chaos! O father, your son is good, but we need a greater. Your children will never love you under this new law, that they are not to love one another as you love them!” How does he love God who cannot believe that God loves every throb of the human heart toward another? Did the Lord not die that we should love one another and be one with him and the Father? And can there be oneness without difference, or is knowing difference not essential to the deepest love? Are all to have the same face? Then why faces at all? If heaven’s plains are crowded for ever with one face repeated, monotony will turn bliss ghastly in a moment; why not featureless ivory spheres instead? Or are we to start afresh with countenances all new, each beautiful, each a revelation of the infinite father, each distinct and all blending toward a full revealing, but never again the dear old faces, each with its whole story, that at the mere thought draw our hearts out of our bosoms? Were they created only to become dear and be destroyed? Is it in wine only that the old is better? Would the Son of Man congratulate the mourner on such a prospect? It is a shame that such monstrous unbelief should call for argument.
A heaven without human love would be inhuman, and still more undivine, to desire; no one made in God’s image ought to. The lord of life died that his father’s children might grow perfect in love, loving their brothers and sisters as he loved them: must they then cease to know one another? To annihilate the past of our earthly embodiment would crush under an iron heel the very idea of tenderness, human or divine.
We shall all doubtless be changed, but in what direction? To something less, which is degradation? To something that is not we, which is annihilation? Or to something more we, a further development of the divine germ of us, holding all we ever were and must become? What constitutes a man? Not what he thinks he is, nor what his friends at any moment think him. In which of his changing moods is he more himself? Does any lover love so little as to desire no change in the beloved, nothing to bring her closer to the indwelling ideal? In the loveliest there is some little thing unlike her, in which a change would make her not less but more herself. Is it not the essence of the Christian hope that we shall be changed from much bad to all good? A wife who would keep every inconsistency in her husband’s still partly harmonious character does not love well enough for the kingdom of heaven. If his imperfections are essential to the individuality she loves, she may be sure that were he restored to her as she wished, she would soon love him less, perhaps not at all; for whoever does not love perfection will not keep constant in loving. Fault is not lovable; only the good in which the alien fault dwells makes it seem so. Nor do a man’s peculiarities make him beloved, but the essential humanity under them. They may make him interesting, and where not offensive may be loved for the man’s sake, but in themselves they are of smallest account.
We must not confuse peculiarity with diversity: diversity is from God, peculiarity from man. The real man is the divine idea of him, the man God had in view when he began to send him out of thought into thinking, the man he is perfecting by casting out what is not he and developing what is. Among God’s real, that is ideal, men the diversity is infinite: he never repeats his creations, and each child’s difference is lovable. In his children God gives an analysis of himself that will never be exhausted. It is the original God-idea of the individual that will at length be given, without spot or blemish, into the arms of love.
Such, surely, is the heart of the comfort the Lord will give those whose love makes them mourn, and their present blessedness is the expectation of the time when the true lover finds the restored the same as the lost, with precious differences: what was unlike the true self gone or going, the loveliest lovelier still, the restored not merely more than the lost but more the person lost than he or she was. For all that made the person lovable and essential will be more present, being more developed.
Whether or not the Lord was thinking specially of those who mourn for the dead, as I think he was, he surely does not limit the comfort to them; his father has perfect comfort for every human grief. Out upon those miserable theologians who, instead of taking his words into a generous heart to bear truth a hundredfold, pare them till the life is gone, and still offer the dead letter as a creator’s comfort to the sore hearts he made! Some, “as if they were God’s spies,” say the Lord blesses only those who mourn for their sins. What honest man would make a promise that was all reservation but for one unmentioned point? Assuredly those who mourn for their sins will be gloriously comforted, but so will all who are bowed down with any grief. Sorrow is not a part of life but a wind blowing through it, to winnow and cleanse. Where shall the woman go whose child is dying, or whose husband has forsaken her, but to her Father in heaven? Must she keep away until she is sorry for her sins? How could she care to be delivered from them, or accept any comfort, who believed her child lost for ever? Would the Lord have her cheerful because her sins were forgiven? Would such a mother be a woman of whom the saviour of men might have been born? If a woman forgets the child she bore, how shall she remember the father she came from? The Lord came to heal the broken-hearted; therefore he said, “Blessed are the mourners.” Hope in God, mother, for the deadest of your children, even for him who died in his sins. You may wait long, but he will be found; perhaps you yourself will be sent to find him. Rest your hope not on excuses your love would make for him, nor on any theological or sacerdotal quibble, but on him who created him and loves him more than you. God will excuse him better than you can, and his uncovenanted mercy is larger than his ministers’. Shall not the Father do his best to find his prodigal, the good shepherd his lost sheep? The angels in his presence know the Father and watch for the prodigal. You shall be comforted.
One more phase of our mourning for the dead I must consider, the pain within all our pain: the recurring pangs over things we said or did, or failed to say or do, while we were with the departed. The life that would give itself to the other aches at not having given what it might. We cast ourselves at their feet crying, Forgive me, my heart’s own! but they are pale with distance and seem not to hear. They may be longing after us in like agony of love, but know better, or are more assured than we, that we shall be comforted together by and by.
Consider, brother, sister, the splendour of God, and answer: would he be perfect if his restitution of all things gave us no chance to declare our bitter grief and shame for the past, to sob, I am your slave, and make amends? Yet when the moment comes, one look in the eyes may be enough, for we shall know one another even as God knows us. Like the prodigal’s purposed words in the parable, our confession may hardly find place; heart may so speak to heart as to forget there were such things. Mourner, hope in God, and comfort where you can, and the lord of mourners will comfort you the sooner. Your very severity with yourself may already have moved him to take your part.
To those who mourn lost love, from whom a friend, brother or lover has turned away: what shall I cry to them? You too shall be comforted, only listen. Whatever selfishness clouds your mourning love must be burned out of it, by extreme pain if need be. Your loss may have come from what in your love was not love; anyhow, you must suffer for its defect until it is supplied. God will not, like the unjust judge, avenge you to escape your crying, and no crying will make him comfort your selfishness. He will not make you incapable of loving truly. He despises neither your love, though mingled with selfishness, nor the suffering that springs from both; he will disentangle the selfishness and burn it. His cure for both is to make you love more and more truly, not with the love of love but with love for the person whose lost love you bemoan; for the love of love is love of yourself. Begin to love as God loves and your grief will ease, but wait his time for comfort. What he will do for you, only he knows; you may never know what he will do, only what he has done, which was too good for you to know except by receiving it. The moment you are capable of it, it will be yours.
One thing is clear about every trouble: the natural way with it is straight to the Father’s knee. He is father for his children, else why did he make himself their father? Would you not, mourner, rather be comforted in the one eternal fashion, the child by the father, than in some poor temporary way that leaves you exposed to your worst enemy, your own unreclaimed self, whose one good point is that he always brings you to sorrow?
The Lord has come to wipe away our tears, and will do it as soon as he can; until then he would have them flow without bitterness, so he tells us it is blessed to mourn, because of the comfort on its way. Accept his comfort now, and so prepare for what is at hand. He is getting you ready, but you must work with him, or he will never be done. He must have you pure in heart, eager after righteousness, a very child of your father in heaven.