Beatitude Week - Day 4: The Mourners and the Meek

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

There are two basic categories for “hard teachings of Jesus.” There are the teachings that are hard to understand, and then there are the teachings that are easy to understand and hard to do. The first Beatitude – blessed are the poor in spirit – is one of the latter. Be humble. Got it Jesus – I’ll get right on that. The next two are little harder to make out at first glance.

We are still talking about blessings, right? What could it possibly mean to be blessed by mourning? And meek people are the quiet, shy, types, right? It seems unlikely that loud, powerful types will hand over the earth to them, doesn’t it?

Let’s start with “blessed are those who mourn.” What this does NOT mean is that spiritual people must be depressed and depressing people. The life of Jesus demonstrates this. His detractors accused him of being a drunkard and a glutton. But I think the life of Jesus also demonstrates what this means – to be present in the midst of and to be aware of the suffering around us. Mourning means not pretending that everything is ok when we know it isn’t, and not ignoring the suffering around us just because it doesn’t directly affect us.

I think this guy expresses well what that would could look like:

The terms of the promise here are important – they will be comforted. The consolation looked for is from God. And I don’t think it is a coincidence that one of the names for the Holy Spirit is “the Comforter.” The Power of God is active in the world to redeem and transform those things that cause us to mourn. Mourning doesn’t mean that we have to bear the burdens of the entire world ourselves. It means that we look to the One who gives true comfort, and work alongside Him, empowered by His Spirit, to do His will.

And what about the meek? This is one of those times that the English language and the Greek don’t match up so well. The meaning of the Greek word translated “meek” means “one who has power under control.” Meek does not mean weak. Meek means discerning the difference between having the ability to do something, and knowing whether it is right or wrong to do it. As Jeff Goldblum says in that great philosophical work of our times, Jurassic Park “You were so worried about whether you could do something that you never stopped to ask whether you should do it.”

So, read it again this way: “Blessed are those with their power under control, for they shall inherit the earth.” The patient, the faithful, the self-controlled, those who consider their actions based on the will of God and on the effect on others – they will inherit the earth. And I think Jesus has in mind here the redeemed earth of God’s new creation. The transformed earth that is - in fact as well as promise – the kingdom of God.

Another way to approach the idea of meekness, and one that has particular application for our society, is to submit ourselves to letting our actions speak for us, and letting God speak on our behalf. Here the power in question is the power of our speech, and that matches up pretty well with the traditional "quiet person" definition of meekness. Just because we can spend all our time justifying ourselves to others doesn't necessarily mean that we should. Who are we trying to impress? Richard Foster says in his great book on spiritual discipline: "We are so accustomed to relying on words to manage and control others. If we are silent, who will take control? God will take control, but we will never let him take control until we trust him."

A.W. Tozer puts it this way: "The labor of self-love is a heavy one indeed. Think for yourself whether much of your sorrow has not arisen from someone speaking slightly of you. The heart's fierce effort to protect itself from every slight, to shield its touchy honor from the bad opinion of friend and enemy, will never let the mind have rest. Such a burden as this is not necessary to bear. Jesus calls us to His rest, and meekness is His method. The meek has accepted God's estimate of his own life. In himself nothing, in God everything; that is his motto. As he walks on in meekness he will be happy to let God defend him."

Pursuing God...by Kayak

It can be difficult to express spiritual realities in images. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to be the cover designer at a Christian publishing house. “Ah, here’s another book about the Holy Spirit – shall I use the same clip art dove I used last time, or try a ‘tongue of fire,’ whatever that is?” But I just finished a book whose cover takes the cake.

It’s “The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine” by A.W. Tozer. My dad let me borrow it – thanks, Dad. Published in 1948, it is one of those books whose clear, evocative language on a deep subject give it a timeless quality, and it is full of great insight on what it means to seek God.

So how do you express that in a cover image? The publishers of this edition couldn’t decide, so went with two different representations.



At the bottom, a classic – the winding road. We’re on safe ground here. Jesus used this one.

At the top – a man in a kayak paddling into the sun.

Wait, what?

Every time I picked up this book I saw that kayak and just had to shake my head a little. A friend that I shared my disbelief with pointed out that the man in the kayak is soaking wet, though he seems to paddling across crystal clear water. Photoshop? Or poor kayaking skills? I have seen soaking wet people in a clear stretch of water before.

But, if we let our imagination loose for moment, I can make sense of these two images in a way that I sure the publishers did not intend.

There are two ways to pursue God. 1) You can thrash about, furiously paddling, exerting all your energy to achieve an impossible goal, like a man trying to kayak as quickly as possible into the sun.

2) You can walk down the road. To make sure you are on the right road, follow someone who has gone there before. I recommend Jesus. In this way you exercise trust, and aren’t depending solely on your own effort, like a mad kayaker. You may not always be able to see the destination clearly, and there will be rough patches and sunny spots. Also, you have the benefit of knowing Someone put that road there, so clearly Someone wants to be found.

There, enough of that. Now, some gems from Tozer:

“We have laid the altar and divided the sacrifice into parts, but now seem satisfied to count the stones and rearrange the pieces with never a care that there is not one sign of fire upon lofty Carmel.”

“Religion, so far as it is genuine, is in essence the response of created personalities to the creating personality, God.”

“To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love – justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart.”

“To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a deduction from evidence which they consider adequate, but He remains personally unknown to the individual. Others do not even go so far as this; they know of Him only by hearsay. To many others God is an ideal, another name for goodness or beauty or truth; or He is law or life or the creative impulse back of the phenomena of existence. Christians, to be sure, go further than this, at least in theory. But for millions of Christians, nevertheless, God is no more real than He is to the non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle.”

“Faith is the gaze of the soul upon a saving God. Faith is not a once-done act, but a continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God.”

“The man who has struggled to purify himself and has had nothing but repeated failures will experience real relief when he stops tinkering with his soul and looks away to the perfect One. While he looks at Christ, the very thing he has been trying to do will be getting done within him.”

“If faith is the gaze of the heart at God, and if this gaze is but the raising of the inward eyes to meet the all-seeing eyes of God, then it follows that it is one of the easiest possible things to do. It would be like God to make the most vital thing easy and place it within the range of possibility for the weakest and poorest of us.”