Blessed Are Those Who Mourn

My wife found out today that her grandmother passed away at four o’clock this morning. So here I sit, studying and training to become a pastor, a figure who we look to for answers, for guidance, for reason, for purpose, and sometimes just for help, and I’ve realized in less than twelve hours that I have no answers, no guidance, no reasons, and no hope to give to others. I’m just a man. I can’t see past the horizon and heaven doesn’t avail itself to me in my dreams. Of course, my friends will tell me no one expects this of me. My one day parishioners will not chase me from the church when I cannot divine next week’s weather or tell them what God expects from each of them. But I feel the need to push back against my friends for just a moment. Those parishioners may not expect me to have the answers or to fix the world, but when their world comes crashing down around them they will come to me, and they will weep, and they may not ask me for the answers because they cannot dare not hope, but their eyes will beg me to fix this.

I’ve seen pain in other’s lives my whole life. I watched my Dad lose his dad; I watched my Mom lose hers. I saw a child die from cancer when I was seventeen. I’ve seen poverty and illness in the mountains of Guatemala. I watched a mother fall to sleep with her daughter on a cardboard pad in Mexico. I held my friend when his dad died of a heart attack. And I hold my wife now when she cries just because she misses her grandmother. Is this the role of pastor? To weep for the world yet sit powerless to change it? Can I do nothing?

I know people will read this and shake their heads, go tsk, tsk and utter such wisdom as, “He doesn’t realize it’s not about him; it’s about Christ, and all answers are found in Christ. Only God can change the world.” And they would be right. But I guess I feel as if the world isn’t looking for answers. It seems sometimes that the world has given up on answers. For so long we in the Church have been screaming all the right answers at all the people we knew needed to hear them, only to realize these people weren’t looking for answers at all. Too much pain clouds the senses, dims the spiritual sensibilities, and makes you want to not believe in God, for that would mean God allows the pain. So to reject pain one rejects God. But one cannot reject the pain. It lingers on, becoming dull in time only to sharpen again when tragedy comes back to us. With all this, hope seems distant, where death is the only way out. We lose everything, the bad with the good, and fall to sleep in this world only to wake in another.

In pain, however, is the answer. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian who plotted against the Nazi’s during World War II, wrote this while awaiting his execution in a Nazi prison: “God allows himself to be edged out of the world and on to a cross…and in that way, God can be with us and help us…Only a suffering God can help.” Our God suffers with us. To be omniscient, to intimately know everything, is to suffer. So in all illnesses, natural disasters, deaths, broken hearts, lost jobs, imprisonments, poverty, and pain, God knows the suffering of His people. God suffers with us; if God did not, then there would exist an experience that God did not know, and God would no longer be omniscient. If God did not suffer, God would no longer be God. Perhaps in this truth lies what it is to pastor, to suffer with one’s people. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” In addition, we cannot weep for those we do not love. From love follows the mourning. From mourning follows the blessing. Let us then love one another, for this is from God.