Have you ever tasted baking power? I mean straight out of the box, pure baking powder?  It’s awful—trust me, I tried it once! As it stands alone, baking powder tastes terrible, but when it’s mixed with other ingredients in a recipe it can help to create some of the most delicious foods we have in our diet (e.g. cookies, cakes—you know, the really healthy stuff).

Individual verses in the Bible are a lot like different ingredients in a recipe—like baking powder. Often times they are not intended to stand alone, but are understood better when they are read in the context to which they belong.  There is a danger in approaching a particular verse in Scripture without reading it in the greater context for which it was originally intended. The danger is that we only get a small portion of the greater message the author may have originally wanted us to understand. Matthew 5:4 is one of those verses that, if taken out of context, can be greatly misunderstood.

When we first read the beatitude, “blessed are those who mourn,” we usually think of the feeling we have had when a loved one has died—we “mourn” the fact that this person is now no longer in our life. And though it is true that Jesus does, in fact, comfort people who are in mourning over the loss of a loved one, that’s not the way this verse is to be understood within the greater context in which we read it. The idea here is more related to a person’s spiritual condition, as do all of the beatitudes in these first twelve verses of The Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is not talking about the sorrow of bereavement, but the sorrow of repentance. It’s important to notice that this is the second beatitude—in other words, it’s one thing for a person to be spiritually poor or spiritually bankrupt before God like the first beatitude addresses, but it is quite another thing for them to grieve or mourn over this fact. Or as John Stott has put it, in his excellent commentary on The Sermon on the Mount, “confession is one thing, contrition is another.” Yes, our God is a God of grace, but sin is sin, and we need to address it in our lives. 

Yet the beatitude does not end here; Jesus goes on to say that people who mourn the sin in their life “will be comforted.” In other words, as, John Stott has noted, “they will be comforted by the only comfort that can relieve their distress, that being the free forgiveness of God.” So the point of this beatitude seems to be that we as Christians need to be repentant, sorrowful or mournful for our sins, but we also need to rest in the fact that we can be comforted and forgiven, by the great Comforter Himself.

—Jim Vermilya

We are all sinners and need to "mourn" our sinful state; but we are also forgiven and have been set free by the Great Comfortor, Jesus Christ!