'Blessed are they that mourn.' Ah! that is not a universal bliss. All
mourners are _not_ blessed. It would be good news, indeed, to a world so
full of miseries that men sometimes think it were better not to be, and
holding so many wrecked and broken hearts, if every sorrow had its
benediction. But just as we saw in the preceding discourse that the
poverty which Christ pronounced blessed is not mere straitness of
circumstances, or lack of material wealth, so here the sorrow, round the
head of which He casts this halo of glory, is not that which springs
from the mere alteration of external circumstances, or from any natural
causes. The influence of the first saying runs through all the
Beatitudes, and since it is 'the poor in spirit' who are there
pronounced happy, so here we must go far deeper than mere outward
condition, in order to find the ground of the benediction pronounced.
Let us be sure, to begin with, of this, that no condition, be it of
wealth or woe, is absolutely and necessarily good, but that the seat of
all true blessedness lies within, in the disposition which rightly meets
the conditions which God sends.
So I would say, first, that the mourners whom Christ pronounces
'blessed' are those who are 'poor in spirit.' The mourning is the
emotion which follows upon that poverty. The one is the recognition of
the true estimate of our own characters and failings; the other is the
feeling that follows upon that recognition. The one is the prophet's
clear-sighted 'I am a man of unclean lips'; the other is the same
prophet's contemporaneous wail, 'Woe is me, for I am undone!'
And surely, brethren, if you and I have ever had anything like a glimpse
of what we really are, and have brought ourselves into the light of
God's face, and have pondered upon our characters and our doings in
that--not 'fierce' but all-searching, 'light' that flashes from Him,
there can be no attitude, no disposition, more becoming the best, the
purest, the noblest of us, than that 'Woe is me, for I am undone!'
Oh, dear friends, if--not as a theological term, but as a clinging,
personal fact--we realise what sin against God is, what must necessarily
come from it, what aggravations His gentleness, His graciousness, His
constant beneficence cause, how facilely we do the evil thing and then
wipe our lips and say, 'We have done no harm,' we should be more
familiar than we are with the depths of this experience of mourning for
sin.
I cannot too strongly urge upon you my own conviction--it may be worth
little, but I am bound to speak it--that there are few things which the
so-called Christianity of this day needs more than an intenser
realisation of the fact, and the gravity of the fact, of personal
sinfulness. There lies the root of the shallowness of so much that calls
itself Christianity in the world to-day. It is the source of almost all
the evils under which the Church is groaning. And sure I am that if
millions of the people that complacently put themselves down in the
census as Christians could but once see themselves as they are, and
connect their conduct with God's thought about it, they would get shocks
that would sober them. And sure I am that if they do not thus see
themselves here and now, they will one day get shocks that will stupefy
them. And so, dear friends, I urge upon you, as I would upon myself, as
the foundation and first step towards all the sunny heights of
God-likeness and blessedness, to go down, down deep into the hidden
corners, and see how, like the elders of Israel whom the prophet beheld
in the dark chamber, we worship creeping things, abominable things,
lustful things, in the recesses within. And then we shall possess more
of that poverty of spirit, and the conscious recognition of our own true
character will merge into the mourning which is altogether blessed.
Now, note, again, how such sorrow will refine and ennoble character. How
different our claims upon other men would be if we possessed this sober,
saddened estimate of what we really are! How our petulance, and
arrogance, and insisting upon what is due to us of respect and homage
and deference would all disappear! How much more rigid would be our
guard upon ourselves, our own emotions, our own inclinations and tastes!
How much more lenient would be our judgment of the openly and
confessedly naughty ones, who have gone a little further in act, but not
an inch further in essence, than we have done! How different our
attitude to our fellows; and how lowly our attitude to God! Such sorrow
would sober us, would deliver us from our lusting after the gauds of
earth, would make us serious and reflective, would bring us to that
'sad, wise valour' which is the conquering characteristic of humanity.
There is nothing more contemptible than the lives which, for want of
this self-knowledge, foam away in idle mirth, and effervesce in what the
world calls 'high spirits.'
'There is no music in the life
That sounds with idiot laughter solely,
There's not a string attuned to mirth
But has its chords in melancholy.'
So said one whose reputation in English literature is mainly that of a
humorist. He had learned that the only noble humanity is that in which
the fountains of laughter and of tears lie so close together that their
waters intermingle. I beseech you not to confound the 'laughter of
fools,' which is the 'crackling of thorns under the pot,' with the true,
solemn, ennobling gladness which lives along with this sorrow of my
text.
Further, such mourning infused into the sorrow that comes from external
disasters will make it blessed too. As I have said, there is nothing in
any condition of life which necessarily and universally makes it
blessed. Though poets and moralists and Christian people have talked a
great deal, and beautifully and truly, about the sanctifying and
sweetening influences of calamity, do not let us forget that there are
perhaps as many people made worse by their sorrows as are made better by
them. There is such a thing as being made sullen, hard, selfish,
negligent of duty, resentful against God, hopeless, by the pressure of
our calamities. Blessed be God, there is such a thing as being drawn to
Him by them! Then they, too, come within the sweep of this benediction
of the Master, and outward distress is glorified into the sorrow which
is blessed. A drop or two of this tincture, the mourning which comes
from poverty of spirit, slipped into the cup of affliction, clears and
sweetens the waters, and makes them a tonic bitter. Brethren, if our
outward losses and disappointments and pains help us to apprehend, and
are accepted by us in the remembrance of, our own unworthiness, then
these, too, are God's sweet gifts to us.
One word more. This mourning is perfectly compatible with, and indeed is
experienced in its purest form only along with, the highest and purest
joy. I have been speaking about the indispensable necessity of such
sadness for all noble life. But let us remember, on the other hand, that
no one has so much reason to be glad as he has who, in poverty of
spirit, has clasped and possesses the wealth of the Kingdom. And if a
man, side by side with this profound and saddened sense of his own
sinfulness, has not a hold of the higher thing--Christ's righteousness
given to penitence and faith--then his knowledge of his own unworthiness
is still too shallow to inherit a benediction. There is no reason why,
side by side in the Christian heart, there should not lie--there is
every reason why there should lie--these two emotions, not mutually
discrepant and contradictory, but capable of being blended together--the
mourning which is blessed, and the joy which is unspeakable and full of
glory.
II. And now a word or two with regard to the consolation which such
mourning is sure to receive.
It is not true, whatever sentimentalists may say, that all sorrow is
comforted and therefore blessed. It may be forgotten. Pain may sting
less; men may betake themselves to trivial, or false, unworthy, low
alleviations, and fancy that they are comforted when they are only
diverted. But the sorrow meant in my text necessarily ensures for every
man who possesses it the consolation which follows. That consolation is
both present and future.
As for the present, the mourning which is based, as our text bases it,
on poverty of spirit, will certainly bring after it the consolation of
forgiveness arid of cleansing. Christ's gentle hand laid upon us, to
cause our guilt to pass away, and the inveterate habits of inclination
towards evil to melt out of our nature, is His answer to His child's
cry, 'Woe is me, for I am undone!' And anything is more probable than
that Christ, hearing a man thus complain of himself before Him, should
fail to send His swift answer.
Ah, brethren! you will never know how deep and ineffably precious are
the consolations which Christ can give, unless you have learned despair
of self, and have come helpless, hopeless, and yet confident, to that
great Lord. Make your hearts empty, and He will fill them; recognise
your desperate condition, and He will lift you up. The deeper down we go
into the depths, the surer is the rebound and the higher the soaring to
the zenith. It is they who have poverty of spirit, and mourning based
upon it, and only they, who pass into the sweetest, sacredest, secretest
recesses of Christ's heart, and there find all-sufficient consolation.
In like manner, that consolation will come in its noblest and most
sufficing form to those who take their outward sorrows and link them
with this sense of their own ill-desert. Oh, dear friends, if I am
speaking to any one who to-day has a burdened heart, let such be sure of
this, that the way to consolation lies through submission; and that the
way to submission lies through recognition of our own sin. If we will
only 'lie still, let Him strike home, and bless the rod,' the rod will
blossom and bear fruit. The water of the cataract would not flash into
rainbow tints against the sunshine, unless it had been dashed into spray
against black rocks. And if we will but say with good old Dr. Watts,
'When His strokes are felt,
His strokes are fewer than our crimes,
And lighter than our guilt,'
it will not be hard to bow down and say, 'Thy will be done,' and with
submission consolation will be ours.
Is there anything to say about that future consolation? Very little, for
we know very little. But 'God Himself shall wipe away all tears from
their eyes.' The hope of that consolation is itself consolation, and
the hope becomes all the more bright when we know and measure the depths
of our own evil. Earth needs to be darkened in order that the magic,
ethereal beauty of the glow in the western heavens may be truly seen.
The sorrow of earth is the background on which the light of heaven is
painted.
So, dear friends, be sure of this, that the one thing which ought to
move a man to sadness is his own character. For all other causes of
grief are instruments for good. And be sure of this, too, that the one
thing which can ensure consolation adequate to the grief is bringing the
grief to the Lord Christ and asking Him to deal with it. His first word
of ministry ran parallel with these two Beatitudes. When He spoke them
He began with poverty of spirit, and passed to mourning and consolation,
and when He opened His lips in the synagogue of Nazareth He began with,
'The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He hath anointed Me to
preach good tidings unto the poor, to give unto them that mourn in Zion
a diadem for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise
for the spirit of heaviness.'