The second blessing Jesus pronounced in His most famous sermon is in verse 4 of the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.” This verse is very reassuring. I can attest to the veracity of this pronouncement from personal experience. But there is more to this than just the simple definition on its face. We mourn more than the loved ones who pass on. We also mourn for things, conditions and countries.
This present life is fraught with loss. The nature of war is such that carnage is its primary characteristic. Jesus promised we would have strife in this world before we attain the next. Yet Jesus promises us comfort in our journey to attainment of the Kingdom of God. He even promises later to send the Holy Spirit for just that purpose. Love is accompanied with feelings of loss when the loved person, place or thing is subject to the depredations of the enemy of our souls.
We would think that mourning is an unnecessary pain when God can will the world to be perfect. Yet perfection of the world is the will of God. However, God respects the choices of His children as they travel along the path of their own choosing.
The hallmark of human growth is that a certain amount of stress is necessary for proper development. Our muscles atrophy if they are not stressed regularly. The same is true of our souls. The spiritual war being fought between the fallen angels and dead Nephalim on the one side and God and His planned world on the other is used by God to give us that stress. It is natural, a part of love, for us to mourn the loss of the casualties of this war. God delights in comforting His children who mourn. Grace, the unmerited favor of God, is many-faceted. Receiving grace is always a blessing. So whenever we mourn, for whatever reason, we are truly blessed.
The third blessing is often misunderstood, “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the Earth.” the primary misunderstanding comes from the word meek. Most people can’t distinguish between that which is meek and that which is weak. But the difference is profound. Meekness is strength under discipline. Chuck Norris is meek. No one ever calls him weak. (The joke: At least not more than once. But were that so he wouldn’t be meek. He wouldn’t be under control.) To be truly meek is to subject one’s strength to discipline, to control it in love.
Meekness is an attribute of love. Arrogance and egoism are antonymic of meekness. Think of the old television series ‘Doctari’ of the 1970s. The cross-eyed lion, Clarence, was meek. A powerful cat, weighing hundreds of pounds, he lived in harmony with the humans who nurtured him and protected them as his pride. The lion is a symbol of strength in all human societies. That is why a lion was chosen for the show.
The lion is also a symbol for the Anointed of God, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. No human being has ever been as powerful, nor as disciplined, as Jesus of Nazareth. The one time he displayed His might before the resurrection, the cleansing of the Temple, so frightened the temple guards and leaders of the Sanhedrin that they did nothing to restrain Him. The fact that He was correct in His accusations gave them pause, even though they stood to lose a very large revenue stream.
So we can rest in the grace of God whenever the world’s wrongness makes us mourn. We are blessed. And when we reign in our strength under discipline of God, we are also blessed, because we shall inherit the Earth.
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