Matthew 5:4

5:3-12 Our Saviour here gives eight characters of blessed people, which represent to us the principal graces of a Christian. 1. The poor in spirit are happy. These bring their minds to their condition, when it is a low condition. They are humble and lowly in their own eyes. They see their want, bewail their guilt, and thirst after a Redeemer. The kingdom of grace is of such; the kingdom of glory is for them. 2. Those that mourn are happy. That godly sorrow which worketh true repentance, watchfulness, a humble mind, and continual dependence for acceptance on the mercy of God in Christ Jesus, with constant seeking the Holy Spirit, to cleanse away the remaining evil, seems here to be intended. Heaven is the joy of our Lord; a mountain of joy, to which our way is through a vale of tears. Such mourners shall be comforted by their God. 3. The meek are happy. The meek are those who quietly submit to God; who can bear insult; are silent, or return a soft answer; who, in their patience, keep possession of their own souls, when they can scarcely keep possession of anything else. These meek ones are happy, even in this world. Meekness promotes wealth, comfort, and safety, even in this world. 4. Those who hunger and thirst after righteousness are happy. Righteousness is here put for all spiritual blessings. These are purchased for us by the righteousness of Christ, confirmed by the faithfulness of God. Our desires of spiritual blessings must be earnest.

4 . mourn ] Those who mourn for sin are primarily intended; but the secondary meaning, “those who are in suffering and distress,” is not excluded. The first meaning is illustrated by 2 Corinthians 7:10 , “For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of, but the sorrow of the world worketh death.”

Matthew 5:4 . Blessed [or happy ] are they that mourn — Namely, for their own sins and those of other men, and are steadily and habitually serious, watchful, and circumspect; for they shall be comforted — Even in this world, with the consolation that arises from a sense of the forgiveness of sins, peace with God, clear discoveries of his favour, and well-grounded, lively hopes of the heavenly inheritance, and with the full enjoyment of that inheritance itself in the world to come.

Matthew 5:4 . οἱ πενθοῦντες . Who are they? All who on any account grieve? Then this Beatitude would give utterance to a thoroughgoing optimism. Pessimists say that there are many griefs for which there is no remedy, so many that life is not worth living. Did Jesus mean to meet this position with a direct negative, and to affirm that there is no sorrow without remedy? If not, then He propounds a puzzle provoking thoughtful scholars to ask: What grief is that which will without fail find comfort? There can be no comfort where there is no grief, for the two ideas are correlative. But in most cases there is no apparent necessary connection. Necessary connection is asserted in this aphorism, which gives us a clue to the class described as οἱ πενθοῦντες . Their peculiar sorrow roust be one which comforts itself, a grief that has the thing it grieves for in the very grief. The comfort is then no outward good. It lies in a right state of soul, and that is given in the sorrow which laments the lack of it. The sorrow reveals love of the good, and that love is possession. In so far as all kinds of sorrow tend to awaken reflection on the real good and ill of human life, and so to issue in the higher sorrow of the soul, the second Beatitude may be taken absolutely as expressing the tendency of all grief to end in consolation.— παρακληθήσονται , future. The comfort is latent in the very grief, but for the present there is no conscious joy, but only poignant sorrow.

(4) They that mourn. —The verb is commonly coupled with weeping ( Mark 16:10 ; Luke 6:25 ; James 4:9 ; Revelation 18:15-19 ). Here, as before, there is an implied, though not an expressed, limitation. The “mourning” is not the sorrow of the world that worketh “death” ( 2Corinthians 7:10 ) for failure, suffering, and the consequences of sin, but the sorrow which flows out in the tears that cleanse, the mourning over sin itself and the stain which it has left upon the soul. They shall be comforted.—The pronoun is emphatic. The promise implies the special comfort (including counsel) which the mourner needs; “comforted” he shall be with the sense of pardon and peace, of restored purity and freedom. We cannot separate the promise from the word which Christendom has chosen (we need not now discuss its accuracy) to express the work of the Holy Ghost the Comforter, still less from the yearning expectation that then prevailed among such of our Lord’s hearers as were looking for the “consolation”—i.e., the “comfort”—of Israel (Luke 2:25).

4. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted—This "mourning" must not be taken loosely for that feeling which is wrung from men under pressure of the ills of life, nor yet strictly for sorrow on account of committed sins. Evidently it is that entire feeling which the sense of our spiritual poverty begets; and so the second beatitude is but the complement of the first. The one is the intellectual, the other the emotional aspect of the same thing. It is poverty of spirit that says, "I am undone"; and it is the mourning which this causes that makes it break forth in the form of a lamentation—"Woe is me! for I am undone." Hence this class are termed "mourners in Zion," or, as we might express it, religious mourners, in sharp contrast with all other sorts (Isa 61:1-3; 66:2). Religion, according to the Bible, is neither a set of intellectual convictions nor a bundle of emotional feelings, but a compound of both, the former giving birth to the latter. Thus closely do the first two beatitudes cohere. The mourners shall be "comforted." Even now they get beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. Sowing in tears, they reap even here in joy. Still, all present comfort, even the best, is partial, interrupted, short-lived. But the days of our mourning shall soon be ended, and then God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes. Then, in the fullest sense, shall the mourners be "comforted."

Matthew 5:4 . Παρακληθήσονται , shall be comforted ) The future tense indicates promises made in the Old Testament, and now to be performed; see Luke 16:25 , and 2 Thessalonians 2:16 . The poor and the meek are joined together in Matthew 5:3 ; Matthew 5:5 , as in the frequently-occurring עני ואביון , poor and needy, cf. also ch. Matthew 11:29 .

The world is mistaken in accounting the jocund and merry companions the only happy men; their mirth is madness, and their joy will be like crackling of thorns under a pot: but those are rather the happy men, who mourn; yea, such are most certainly happy, who mourn out of duty in the sense of their own sins, or of the sins of others, or who mourn out of choice rather to suffer afflictions and persecutions with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasure of sin for a season. Though such sufferings do excite in them natural passions, yet it is a blessed mourning, for those are the blessed tears which God will wipe at last from his people’s eyes, and such are these. They shall be comforted, either in this life, with the consolations of the Spirit, or with their Master’s joy in the life that is to come, Isaiah 61:3 John 16:20 Jam 1:12 . So as this promise, and declaration of blessedness, is not to be extended to all mourners, but only to such as God hath made so, or who in duty have made themselves so, obeying some command of God, for sympathizing with God’s glory, or with his afflicted people, Romans 12:15 , or testifying their repentance for their sins; for there is a mourning which is a mere natural effect of passion, and a worldly sorrow which worketh unto death, as well as a godly sorrow working repentance to salvation, 2 Corinthians 7:10 .

Matthew 5:4 . Οἱ πενθοῦντες ] Comp. Isaiah 61:2 ; Isaiah 57:17 f. After Chrysostom, these have frequently been understood as those who mourned over their own sins and those of others. These are not excluded, but they are not exclusively or specially meant by the general expression (Keim). They are generally those who are in suffering and distress . Think, for example, of Lazarus, of the persecuted Christians ( John 16:20 ; Hebrews 12:11 ), of the suffering repentant ones ( 2 Corinthians 7:9 ), and so on; for that no unchristian πενθεῖν , no λύπη τοῦ κόσμου , is meant, is ( 2 Corinthians 7:10 ) understood of itself from the whole surroundings. The πενθοῦντες shall, Romans 8:18 , 2 Corinthians 4:17 , John 14:13 , be comforted as a matter of fact in the Messiah’s kingdom by the enjoyment of its blessedness ( Luke 2:25 ; Luke 16:25 ), therefore the Messiah Himself is also called מְנַחֵם (Schoettgen, Hor. II. p. 18; Wetstein, I. p. 665). According to the beatitudes, which all refer to the Messiah’s kingdom, there is no mention of temporal comfort by the promise of the forgiveness of sins, and so on. This in answer to Kienlen in the Stud. u. Kritik. 1848, p. 681.