What Breaks the Heart of God

(Ecclesiastes 7:2-4Isaiah 61:1-4Matthew 5:4)

The world has some clear ideas about what blessing looks like and what it means to live the good life, but Jesus offers us a very different picture.  As I said a couple weeks ago, the key thing we need to understand about the Beatitudes is that they aren’t commands and they aren’t promises, they’re descriptions.  The Sermon on the Mount is not a collection of laws, and these are not a list of things to do.  Rather, they give us a picture of the blessed life, which is in stark contrast to this world’s expectations and desires.  As Jesus says elsewhere, those who strive to save their lives will lose them, while those who lay down their lives for his sake and the sake of the gospel will find them.

Now, that doesn’t just mean those who die for Christ.  That’s certainly part of his meaning, but only part.  The broader sense is what we might call a divine self-forgetful­ness, letting go of our lives in the day-to-day to follow Jesus.  It means releasing control over our lives and living life with open hands—not clenching hard to our prerogatives, our rights, our desires, our position, but letting go and trusting that if we follow Jesus, he will provide for us and we will be satisfied in him.  Indeed, it means letting go because we understand that what he has for us is better than anything we can provide for ourselves, even if it doesn’t seem that way to the world around us.

This is what it means to be poor in spirit; and I think we can call this the blessing that opens up the rest of the Lord’s blessings, because it enables us to see blessing where the world doesn’t.  To the world, the statement “Blessed are those who mourn” is an immediate turnoff—and in our society more than most.  As we’ve noted before, we live in a death-denying culture; we sequester the sick, the infirm and the dying away from the rest of our society, and we spend billions every year to make ourselves look younger than we are.  We don’t want to face the pain of the world, and so as much as possible, we don’t.

It’s understandable that we don’t like suffering; it’s understandable that we don’t like grieving.  It’s particularly understandable that we don’t like facing up to our own sin, and the damage that we do.  But our efforts to avoid all that, just to make the pain and anxiety go away as quickly as possible, don’t do us any favors.  We try denial, refusing to admit there’s a problem or telling ourselves (and others) that we’ve gotten over our grief; we try problem-solving, looking for an expert who will make everything all better.  Too often, we end up with no way to handle pain and grief except to try to get rid of them.

This way of thinking creeps into our faith.  We see friends and family sick, or in pain, or struggling with some issue, and we define that as a problem and ask God to fix it.  Certainly, I believe in asking God for physical healing, and I’ve seen him do some amazing things; but if our horizon for prayer goes no further than that, we have an issue.  When God doesn’tremove the problem, we think he hasn’t answered our prayers, because we can’t imagine that he might have anything better in mind; we may wonder if he’s heard us, and start to question his love, or perhaps his power.  Pain is a problem, grief is a problem, and if God really loved us, he’d make them go away.

What we fail to see is that as long as we stand in this broken, sin-haunted world, God is not interested in keeping us from pain, or helping us avoid mourning.  God wants us to learn to mourn.  “The heart of the wise”—the wise being the one who is attentive to God, who knows his ways and follows him—“is in the house of mourning.”  Why?  Be­cause our world is an obstinate disaster and an incubator of nightmares.  Because we have each done great evil, and suffered great evil, and that matters.  Because the pain we have suffered is real, and so is the pain we have caused, and both are significant.  Because our sin was the many-headed lash that ripped open Jesus’ back, and the nails through his wrists.  Jesus died, quite literally, of a broken heart, and his heart was broken by our sin; and it is well that our hearts should be broken by what breaks the heart of God.

This is not to say that we should go around miserable all the time, or that it’s somehow wrong to laugh and enjoy ourselves; there is much good and beauty and pure pleasure in this world, and God made those things, and we honor him by delighting in them.  It is to say that we need to face our own sin, and the pain we cause ourselves and others, honestly, with our defenses down; we need to let it grieve us, and let God teach us to mourn the ill that we do.  It means that we need to face the hurt that has been done to us, and the losses we have suffered, with equal honesty, and let ourselves weep.  And it means that we cannot harden our hearts against the pain of the world, but let them break.

But note this:  that isn’t the end of the story.  Jesus doesn’t say, “Blessed are those who mourn because mourning is good for them”; he says, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”  Two key things here.  First, only those who mourn are com­forted; to deny or avoid mourning is to foreclose the possibility of comfort.  That’s just how it works.  God’s healing and peace come only as we move through our pain, not by any other road.  God doesn’t do shortcuts.

Second, his comfort doesn’t just make our mourning bearable; Jesus doesn’t say, “Those who mourn will be OK, for they will be comforted.”  No, he says, “Blessed are those who mourn.”  Out of our mourning, in the midst of our grief, God will comfort us, and his comfort will be so great that it will make even our mourning a blessing, to us and to others.  Stop and think about that:  you can be so powerfully comforted in your suffering that the pain and loss are worth bearing for the sake of the comfort God gives.

This is most true when we mourn for our own sin; for then the comfort we receive is the assurance of God’s grace and his faithfulness to forgive us, and the promise that he is at work by his Holy Spirit to purify our hearts and make us holy.  Indeed, it’s when we’re truly and deeply grieved by our sin that we’re most open to the Spirit’s work.  To face our own sin honestly and weep for the wrong we have done, and the wrong we desire to do, opens us up for the greatest work of healing and comfort possible in our lives:  the healing of our sinful, divided hearts by the love and grace of God in Christ Jesus.
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