Blessed are those who mourn: They shall be comforted.
—Matthew 5:4
Father Richard reflects on the sacred nature of our ability to grieve—our own pain and that of the world:
In this beatitude, Jesus is describing the state of those who weep, those who have something to mourn about. They feel the pain of the world. Jesus is saying that those who can grieve, those who can cry, are those who will understand by coming closer to the heart of God.
Jesus praises the weeping class, those who can enter into solidarity with the pain of the world and not try to extract themselves from it. Weeping over our sin and the sin of the world is an entirely different mode than self-hatred or hatred of others. The weeping mode, if I can call it that, allows us to bear the pain of the world without looking for perpetrators or victims. Instead, we recognize the tragic reality in which both sides are trapped. Tears from God are always for everybody, for our universal exile from home. [1]
New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine describes how Jesus’s listeners would have heard echoes of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah’s message of consolation:
The beatitude has a particular resonance for Jesus’s followers that also draws from the Jewish tradition…. The passage Jesus partially cites as part of his address to the Nazareth synagogue in Luke 4, reads,
The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me …; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners … ; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion—to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit…. [Isaiah 61:1–3]
[Isaiah] comforts the mourners in Zion by telling them that theirs is not the last generation, that what they may not see to fruition, their children and their children’s children will. To mourn in Israel means that we are not alone; we have not only our friends and relatives but also the previous generations and the generations to come. And we take comfort in that. [2]
Father Richard recognizes mourning as a quality that connects the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes:
Mourning might be thought of as the prophetic “way of tears,” a letting down of our defenses, in stark contrast to our more common ways of heroic willpower, commandment, obedience, force, anger, and legitimated violence. It takes an initial tender vulnerability (“wounding”) to defeat our ego and to open us to full consciousness—which must include the scary unconscious! It is a movement, frankly, from the Ten Commandments to the eight Beatitudes. A movement that the prophets illustrated for us twenty-five hundred years ago, and that we need—out of desire and desperation—to recover today. [3]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media, 2022), 140–141.
[2] Amy-Jill Levine, Sermon on the Mount: A Beginner’s Guide to the Kingdom of Heaven (Abingdon Press, 2020), 13–14.
[3] Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage (Convergent Books, 2025), xxviii.
Image Credit and inspiration: Minh Trí, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like a raindrop poised on a leaf, the Beatitudes provide a drop-by-drop prescription to counter-culturally create the kin-dom of God.
Story from Our Community:
One of the most powerful aspects of Jesus’s life was his willingness to fully experience and express human emotion, including grief. Jesus embodied what it means to mourn, not as a sign of weakness, but as an act of love, justice, and divine sorrow for a wounded world…. Jesus allowed himself to fully feel and express grief, loss, and sorrow with Martha and Mary. Jesus’s tears reveal that the Divine One does not rush past mourning but enters into humanity’s pain. This profound moment shows that Jesus did not dismiss suffering with divine detachment. No, he stood in it, felt it, and wept with those who wept.
—Malika C.
