We Shall Be Comforted
I have been thinking about Pastor
Erika’s sermon several weeks ago on the beatitude, “Blessed are those who mourn
for they shall be comforted,” and her assertion that mourning what is wrong
with the world—death, sin, waste, abuse, pain—is a necessary step to receiving
comfort, the comfort that only Jesus brings, a comfort of ultimate hope.
We
understand, to some extent, the suffering caused by the sinful choices of
humanity. But suffering seems to be the
very fabric of the natural world, too.
The reality is that for some to live, others must die. For me to have dinner, some plants and
animals gave their lives. Annie Dillard
in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
notices the ridiculous measure of death in nature. For a few spiders to live, thousands more
will die. When trees grow, they feed off
the dead remains of previous plant and animal life. Female praying mantises eat their mates during the
act of reproduction! When Jonah was
sitting under a shady vine waiting for Nineveh to be destroyed, a worm came
along (at God’s command) just doing his worm-thing, trying to get some lunch
out of the vine, and the vine withered.
“The Circle of Life” tries to prettify it, but lions do hunt down and
eat other animals, and those animals suffer.
Death is the way of life here on earth.
Do we mourn that?
Yes, we
do. The necessity of death is what we mourn. We rightly long for something different,
better, more whole, something that recognizes the goodness, the God-ness, in
all of creation, not just humanity. But
when Christians mourn, we shall be
comforted. We will see a day when
the lion lies down with the lamb, when death is no longer necessary for life,
when we are not subject to aging nor surrounded by the detritus of decay. Our darkness turns to dawning, as the song
goes, because God has promised us a different kind of life. That life has been planted within us, so
sometimes we sense the gruesome disconnect between what is and what shall be,
but someday we will see “face to face.”
For us to
live, Jesus Christ had to die. But he
did not remain in death; instead, he conquered it. The poet John Donne said, “And death shall be
no more; death, thou shalt die!” Jesus
showed us the way to that new kind of life, and now because we have tasted it,
we know what’s coming. Ecclesiastes
tells us that there is a time to mourn and a time to be comforted. Today we mourn, but that time to be comforted
is coming; it is God’s promise to us, sealed in the resurrected Jesus. We mourn, but we shall be comforted. That is the ultimate hope in which we live.