“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
Matthew 5:4
Normally when we think of mourning, we associate it with death; the death of something or someone we have loved. For me, last year was a year red-letter year for bereavement – my mom, my cousin Donna, my uncle Jack, friends and mentors from church all passed from this life. Not only these personal losses, but it was also a grief-filled year of corporate sorrow that marked many changes in so many ways. Loss, whatever it may be, is a turning point, a moment of demarcation, a moment where we realize life will never, ever be the same again, and mourning it is how we confront the changes that are inevitable. Noted grief councilor and therapist, Dr. Alan Wolfelt describes mourning like this: “Grief is what you think and feel on the inside, and mourning is when you express that grief outside of yourself. Mourning is grief inside out…mourning is how you move toward hope and healing.” Ultimately the goal is healing, which is a form of restoration, and hope for the future.
While I have no doubt that God is near the broken-hearted (scripture tells us this is true in Psalm 34:18), and he certainly is a comfort to us during difficult times, I have to wonder if is there more to it than simply seeking comfort for a loss . When Christ uttered “blessed are are those who mourn,” I can’t help but suspect that he meant it for something spiritual as well as corporeal. Mourning is bigger than a mere longing for something we have lost – think Adam, Eve and the fall from grace, or bigger yet, think Christ hanging on a Roman torture device for the sake of all. When we mourn, we are yearning for what was and no longer is, and it gives us an opportunity for reflection, recalibration. If forces us to confront the part of ourselves that has become disconnected, to work through the changes we are facing because of the loss. When you stop and really think about it, mourning is a prerequisite to repentance. We must weep for our loss, mourn it first. We can’t really atone for something, unless we first grieve for it, and our grieving cannot end, until we understand our sorrow. It humbles us, puts us in that raw space from which only God’s comfort and guidance can redeem. In this sense, our mourning is a sorrow which flows out in tears, a sadness that cleanses and restores, a grieving over sin itself and the stain which it has left upon the soul.
It’s interesting how Webster’s defines the words blessed, mourn and comfort. To be blessed is to be fortunate, happy, or envied. To mourn is to lament, to feel or express guilt or sorrow. To be comforted is to be given strength and hope, to be called near, or invited in. So Matthew 5:4 could be said like this: Happy and fortunate, envied are those who lament or express feelings of guilt or sorrow, for they will be called near, invited in and given strength and hope. God promises us that if we express our feelings of loss, of guilt and sorrow, repenting of them, He will bless us by calling us near [to Him] and inviting us in [to His presence] and give us strength and hope.
Jesus tells us that in order to live, we must die; die to ourselves, to this world, to sin (Luke 9:23-24). It is through death that resurrection and renewal come. We are blessed when we mourn, because our grieving is our opportunity to honestly and openly confront ourselves head-on, to assess, recalibrate, renew. Whether it’s the loss of a loved one, a job, a way of life, or our connection to God himself, lamenting our losses is cathartic in more ways than we realize.
~SLM
In our family, we make aepfel skivers on Christmas morning – it’s tradition. It got me to thinking about how many other things we associate with Christmas that are simply tradition, man-made precepts, which are not exactly biblical.
Many Christians like to say, “Jesus is the reason for the season,” but this is, in fact, is a mere half-truth. The book of Luke states this about the night Christ was born; “In the same region, shepherds were staying out in the fields and keeping watch at night over their flock.” (Luke 2:8) Generally, shepherds only stay out with their sheep at night two times a year, in the late summer when the sheep are mated, or in the early spring when the lambs are born. Anyone who is familiar with animal husbandry, can tell you that mating season can be managed without camping out in the fields, but birthing is a different story. Babies – whether human or animal – are born when they are born, and more times than not, it’s the middle of the night, suggesting that the time of year when Christ was born was in early spring, “as shepherds watched their flock at night.”
We celebrate the “Nativity of the Christ Child,” which is what early Christians called it, on December 25th bcause it’s a tradition; a tradtion based upon something other than what the Bible teaches. In the early “church” only the anniversary of Christ’s death was revered, as was the death of all the martyrs, but the early Bishops, who it seems would say just about anything to get the pagans to convert, started reasoning that perhaps Christ’s birth coincided with the Roman celebration of the Winter Solstice which was December 25th. Because Christ, reasoned Augustine of Hippo, ” for symbolic reasons,” would choose to be born on that day – the Winter solstice, when the sun begins to bring the light back into the world.
Since then, more and more “traditions” have been added over the centuries –wise men arriving at the manger (they in fact arrived at the “house where they saw the child and his mother Mary…” Matt 2:11), evergreen trees decorated with brightly colored “witch” balls and set ablaze with light, mistletoe, holly, St. Nick/Santa, giving of gifts, reindeer and elves, songs about chesnuts and snow – layer upon layer of blending that which is holy with that whih is not.
Today, as millions of people across the world gather to celebrate the tradition of Christmas, I would submit this for consideration:
In Matthew 15, Jesus asks the Pharisees, “And why do you, by your traditions, break the direct commandments of God?” Telling them further that Isaiah had it right about them when he prophesied, “Their worship is a farce, for they teach man-made ideas…” Paul also addresses the subject of following man-made ideas when he states in 2 Timothy 4:3-4, “For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, will multiply teachers for themselves because they have an itch to hear what they want to hear. They will turn away from hearing the truth and will turn aside to myths.”
And I wonder, with all of the “traditions” we hold dear about Christmas, traditions that even non-believers celebrate, have we turned aside to myths, because it pleases our itchy ears? Something to ponder, to seriously and thoughtfully consider so that we do not find ourselves amongst the Loadiceans, thinking “we are rich” when we are in fact “wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked, neither hot nor cold and must be spit out of the Lord’s mouth.”
~SLM
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