Good & Beautiful Life: The Mourning and Meek

The Big Idea of this study is that those who mourn, as well as the meek, are blessed. Not because of their condition but because in spite of it they experience God’s grace.

Who is really living the good life? Often our perspective is tainted as we compare ourselves to others from an outside point of view. Though people’s external circumstances may look ideal, they may not be experiencing the good life of God. On the other side of the coin, many people today they would never consider themselves to be living the good life, and looking at their circumstances we may agree. Most people who have ever lived on planet earth have found themselves suffering along with the masses of poor and underprivileged. Jesus spoke to these people in the sermon on the mount. The crowds were made up of common people who were suffering and oppressed. He was healing them from their physical illnesses and teaching them and, because of their great number, he went up on the mountain so all could hear him.

He taught them that though their circumstances might lead them to believe they were cursed or forgotten, they were not forgotten by God, but rather blessed. Those who mourn were blessed because they would receive comfort. Our God is the God who suffers along with his creation. In the incarnation of Jesus, he put on flesh, stepped into our shoes, and feels the suffering of the world along with it. How can he bear it? The pain of all the world? Yet this is what our God does. In our mourning we find comfort in a God who can truly empathize with our pain, who can feel it with us.

He taught that the meek were blessed. This may not refer to the virtue of gentleness, but rather to an inability to fight back. The lack of capacity to pull themselves out of their circumstances. Likely this refers to people caught in systems that would keep them subservient to landowners for generations. But Jesus taught that they were blessed – that they would inherit the entire earth, for it belongs to their Father in heaven.

We are not blessed because of the hard situations we find ourselves in. We are blessed in spite of them. And we who may not be experiencing grief or oppression, and who call Jesus Lord, must find ourselves working on the side of the mourning and the oppressed.

Questions for Discussion:

1.  Consider your perspective on who is living the good life. What does that look like to you?

2. Consider the most populated places of the world today and the often low quality of life there, as well as the thousands of years of history before us. Most people lived “nasty, brutish, and short” lives. Yet Jesus taught that there is a blessedness of life within their circumstances. What does this tell us about the nature of “the good life”?

3.Grief and mourning are built into living human lives. When we need comfort in our mourning we receive both sympathy and empathy from others. Sympathy says, “I’m sorry you’re going through this.” And empathy says “I feel it too”. Discuss how the incarnation of Jesus was the greatest act of empathy the world has seen.

4.  The meek are those who are not able to fight back for themselves, or do not have the power to change their circumstances. (Ie. Indentured, potentially oppressed servants who worked for landowners) Jesus said they will one day have land of their own, the entire earth will be their inheritance. How does the hope of eternity affect our blessedness?