“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” (Matthew 5:4).

This is the promise of God echoed throughout the Scriptures. For God said to Hezekiah, in the Book of Kings, “I have heard your prayer and seen your tears; I will heal you.” (2 Kings 20:5). 

The Holy Scriptures are the long-recorded history of God reaching out to humanity. To be human is to be created, chosen and loved as the people made in His image — an image that is not seen outwardly but imprinted upon our hearts. It is the imprint of a law, or divine order, that we cultivate, choosing to accept or reject this law which resounds with heaven’s Truth, Beauty and Goodness. 

We are the people who God has chosen to teach — through Christ — and through the text that is the Word of God spoken into our hearts. We have two testaments not divorced by the distance of time from the reality in which we live now, because our human nature persists as the common factor that connects us. For as we stand and look upon an ancient horizon, where the ocean touches the sky, or the moon that every modern eye has seen in the dark of night or early dawn, so did our ancestors. 

Who are those who mourn but those who love? 

But what do we mean by love? This is not love for things gained or possessed, nor for things lost, stolen or given away — for Jesus said, if someone asks, give; for we let go, forgive, and move together with the Spirit, taking nothing with us except our souls and their spiritual harvest. 

We are to love holiness, and the beauty of souls. To love the living, the miracle of life itself and all its wonders, richness, and biodiversity in all its astonishing beauty. 

St Augustine said, “Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.” 

Sacred beauty is in the gift of life, in being here, going beyond feeling or reason. This transcendence requires an unknowing, for it is not bound to the lines and surfaces of our vision; it is a perception of truth inherent in all creation. 

Love is the recognition of beauty.

As Western civilisation decays through temptation and immorality into a new time of the judges, when the Scripture says people did what was right in their own eyes (Judges 21:25). 

What beauty is there in the cross? It was not a word on a page that hung upon the cross, a faceless name that hangs in the breath that speaks it. It was Jesus Christ, fully God, fully man. Distant in time, yet He knows us personally, intimately. He knew us before we were born, knew everything, and still gave up His life on earth so that we could meet Him in heaven. For God is love. 

When His mother looked upon her Son, just as Simeon prophesied, “so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.” (Luke 2:35). 

Who is hanging on the cross in our hearts? Is it Jesus Christ carrying all our fears and failures? Does our soul lament in godly sorrow? Do we have the heart of a mother for her Son, or is Jesus Christ crucified an abstract reality, a concept that no longer grieves us, so that we live each day thinking our wants are His too? 

To be wholeheartedly Christian, is to love her Son with the same heart — the heart of a mother: with unwavering devotion to Him, a heart ablaze with love for God and the heavenly Spirit, yearning for goodness, truth and beauty. 

To emulate Mary is not about outward appearances, as if to make her an idol — no — but to be inwardly renewed, listening to the Lord and submitting to Him, not to the world and its princes. We do not strive to be mere copies or images like paintings or photographs, still without life, but to become the vision that radiates His light from within out into the world. 

We belong to the royal priesthood of believers, to the mystical body of Christ: while He is away we are the labourers in His vineyard. As lay persons we have a power that acts in the temporal world to order things toward God. Just as it is said, “A priest must have the hand of a father and the heart of a mother” (Bishop Johannes Joseph van der Velden), so must we. 

 

“O come and mourn with me awhile; 

See, Mary calls us to her side; 

O come and let us mourn with her; 

Jesus, our Love, is crucified.”

— Fr Frederick William Faber (1849) 

 

Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. (2 Corinthians 7:10) 

Jesus weeps for our sins, for the corruption of the beautiful, for lost souls; for everything was made to be beautiful, and we were never meant to think we could judge or measure it. 

“Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7). 

The laws of nature were in an original harmony, like a symphony of sounds working together, so that we once stood together on this beautiful earth as people looking up at the stars. 

“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.” (Genesis 1:31). 

If objective beauty is found in our conscious and unconscious recognition of the continuity of all things — the belonging to the language of Love in spirals, fractals, movement and change — to our experience of time in the seasons within every beat of our hearts, then subjective beauty is an unconscious recognition of the familiar developed from birth within us: the preferences drawn from the uniqueness of our individual nature and experiences. 

In the original holiness our consciousness knew with certainty of God and mankind walking together. Enoch, it is said, “was an example of repentance to all generations” (Sirach 44:16). One of two men created by God who were taken bodily up to the heavens. He too must have wept with a godly sorrow at the wickedness of a fallen humanity, at the corruption of beauty. It is this distinction that brings tears. The corruption of the soul is why Jesus came with a baptism of fire to purify us. 

It is written in the book of Lamentations: 

“From on high he sent fire, 
sent it down into my bones. 
He spread a net for my feet 
and turned me back. 
He made me desolate, 
faint all the day long.” (Lamentations 1:13) 

Jeremiah says his sins were woven together and carried like a yoke upon him. Yet for us the Suffering Servant took our sins upon Himself. Jesus suffered for our sins, so that our mourning would at the last be turned into joy — not so that we would not suffer in this world, Jesus told us we pick up our own crosses to follow Him, but that through His faithfulness, and by His grace, we have the hope of heaven. 

Through the thief’s recognition of injustice, the spotless Lamb sacrificed upon the cross, the mercy of God worked through this prayer: “Jesus, remember me when you come into Your kingdom.” 

Blessed are those who mourn, for He collects all our tears in a bottle; they write our sorrows and our compassion in the book of life (cf. Psalm 56:8). A compassion that stirs us to act with love, not simply an empathy that shares a moment of standing in feeling. We are not saved just by our knowing. Jeremiah writes, “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?” Are we passing by our neighbours? Are we caught up in feelings that shout but do not live with compassion and mercy? 

Our mission has changed again. The comfortable Christianity of years gone by is diminished, and we are called again to live differently from what we have come to know: to rebuild the Kingdom in the hearts that have grown hard; to be the voices in the wilderness calling once again to those held in the captivity of sin; to let go of everything except Christ; to shout from the rooftops; to move through the world with renewed faith, calling for repentance and mourning. 

To pray for mercy to God. 

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon us; have mercy upon the whole world. 

Amen.