Sunday School

                                           "God blesses those who mourn,

                   for they will be comforted."
Matthew 5:4

Don't take scripture for granted. Scripture will reach you in your humanity when you decide to soak your life in it. I have decided to teach the sermon on the mount to my Sunday School class. I have a group of young women who have been in church together since they were little.

The Sermon on the Mount was meant for the kingdom people to digest. Jesus is teaching with an expectation for people to wet their appetite and to devour his words with an absolute hunger. He is not teaching to a group of people who are going to walk away and forget his words. He is not teaching to luke warm people. Jesus is teaching to a group of men who will be rembered for living out these words, throughout their lives and throughout their deaths.

I was studying the beatitudes because it will be the first section of scripture that I teach. While I was reading the mourning verse caught my eye. Blessed are those who mourn. This seems so odd at first. When I think of mourn I think of someone mourning the loss of a family memeber, or a friend. This is true to some extent. However, it is a very narrow view point of a mourner.

A mourner is one who mourns the loss. Not necessarily the loss of someone, but just the loss. The loss of a job, the loss of a position, the loss of a name, the loss of a specific identity, the loss of time, the loss of completion.

A mourner is one who despairs in the loss of completion. 

It is someone who recognizes the world as a broken place, and cries out in pain. Someone who hides under the covers and cries for the world. Someone who carries a heaviness around for those who are lost. Someone who can love no matter how many wounds they have been pierced with.

Someone like Jesus. A man who cried for the loss of Israel, for the brokeness of Israel.

A mourner is one who despairs in the loss of completion.

This mourner is blessed, and he will be comforted.

This idea of comforted actually is a demonstration of companionship. A demonstration of completion. The mourner is blessed. He is free from his tedious life. He is free from the world's pain. Because of this freedom a disciple can mourn. Because of his freedom a disciple can be comforted.

Without this freedom, without this blessing we all find ourselves in despair. We find ourselves living as a nihilist. However, with this freedom we can mourn the loss of completion, but we can also be comforted because of the glimpse of restoration that will be.

Those who mourn, who hide under the covers on dark days, know that there are glimpses of the wonderful completion that we will all receive.