Blessed Are Men That Mourn

“0 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” (Luke 13:34)

“As Jesus approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace--but now it is hidden from your eyes.” (Luke 19:41—42)

“When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her were also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. ‘Where have you laid him?’ he asked. ‘Come and see, Lord, they replied. Jesus wept.” (John 11:32—35)

“During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered.” (Hebrews 5:7—8)

Where did Jesus learn to mourn? No answer is given in the scriptures, so let us imagine...

The sun pounded the village of Nazareth. You could see heat waves dancing in the air, and as he so often did, Jesus fled the rising temperature by hiding in a shaded corner of his father’s carpentry shop. Even as a young boy, Jesus knew that this was a man’s place. His sisters and his mother seldom entered. One day he too, Jesus dreamed, would be a man. He would sweat over a piece of wood, pouring body, mind and soul into his creation. He would, like Joseph, engage other men in endless conversations about religion and whispered references to politics. And he would bargain with customers and he would sell goods and he would care for his family. And he too would have a son. And his son would learn from him what a man’s world is all about.

Jesus sat watching Joseph for almost an hour. The flask of water held tightly in his hands was almost empty. He was thinking about quietly leaving to find his brothers and sisters when Simon appeared in the doorway. Simon was Jesus’ favorite uncle. Jesus started to jump up, but something stopped him. His uncles’s face, usually jovial and gentle, was hard and hurt. It was a frightening face that the little boy Jesus could not read. He watched as the two brothers talked. They spoke for only a minute. Then Simon collapsed into a pile of straw, as if exhausted and Joseph, throwing his apron aside, strode from the carpenter’s shop and headed out into the country. Jesus was scarred, but he had to follow his father. Darting from the shop, and running as fast as he could, Jesus was just able to keep Joseph in sight as he left behind the last trees of the village and headed across the barren land. Joseph arrived at the crest of a steep hill. Jesus had stood before on that precipice with his father. Joseph had spoken to him of danger. “The slope is too steep. You could get hurt. Don’t ever try to climb down to the stream.” But there was his father, without a moment’s hesitation, disappearing over the edge. Jesus trembled. He dashed to the cliff and gazed downward. There was his daddy, falling and sliding, stumbling and crashing into rocks. At one moment Jesus even cried out, “Daddy”, but he was not heard. Finally Joseph was at the bottom.

Jesus relaxed his fear, but only for a moment. For, suddenly, Joseph bent down. He picked up a large stone, and with the loudest scream Jesus had ever heard smashed it into a boulder. “No”, Joseph cried out, “No”, again and again. His protests were like thunder. And then the screaming turned to weeping. The man fell to his knees and sobbed, tears that seemed so deep that they must be coming out of the earth itself. Joseph wept. Only after what seemed like an eternity of weeping was Joseph able to hear a softer tear of fear. He heard it but could not see it. He looked all around, upstream, downstream; all was emptiness and silence. Then another cry--a cry of pain. He looked up and finally saw him; Joseph’s small boy child, falling and sliding, stumbling and crashing down the cliff. Each time he caught his balance he cried out, “Daddy”. Joseph could do nothing but wait for his son. It was a bruised and bleeding child that Joseph swept into his arms. Jesus wept. He sobbed tears of pain and tears of fear and most of all tears of non-understanding. From watching his father so often, he thought he knew the world of men. But here, in his father’s weeping, was something he had never seen.

His initiation into manhood leapt forward. For now it was Jesus who wept. And Joseph held on, occasionally joining his own tears to those of his son. Finally there came a moment when it seemed that without saying a word, Jesus was asking a question. And Joseph answered, “Your Uncle Simon walked all the way from Bethany today to tell me that my father had died.” Jesus softly cried out, “Grandpa?” “Yes, grandpa”, Joseph answered through his tears. Jesus hugged his daddy and simply said what had been spoken to him a hundred times, “It will be all right.”

And father took his son’s hand and they began to walk home, the long way, so they would not have to ascend the cliff. Besides, they needed this time together before returning from the wilderness depths. Jesus used the time to think, deep thoughts, uncommon thoughts for one so young. He said to himself, “Blessed are men that mourn.” He would not speak such thoughts aloud for many years.

Jesus was the Son of God. He knew himself to be the Son of God, but he still had to learn many things the hard way, just like other men. The text from Hebrews says that “he learned obedience from what he suffered.” From various painful experiences in his life, Jesus learned obedience to God. He learned to do things God’s way instead of his own way. He learned to surrender, to say, “yes”, to God.

Jesus was willing to suffer, to mourn, to feel any and all pain that goes with being truly alive. Jesus wept. He wept at the death of Lazarus. He was overcome with the grief of Mary and all the Jews. The deep within place, where friendship fills a fearsome emptiness, trembled from the loss of Lazarus. Jesus wept. Jesus wept when he prayed, not the whimpering tears of an injured kitten, but the roaring tears of a raging lion. Loud cries poured forth from a soul that felt the weight of the entire creation groaning in travail. Jesus wept.

Jesus approached the city of Jerusalem and he wept for the entire city. What does it mean to weep for an entire city? Who stands outside your community and weeps for your people? Who weeps for the lost and the lonely? Who weeps for the homeless and the helpless? Who weeps for all of those, who like everyone in Jerusalem, still do not know the ways of peace?

Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem. His tears were not just for his private grief, though we can be sure he had it. He wept for all of humanity and all of creation. His tears came out of the earth and out of the stars. They emerged from the past and from the present and the future. That means that Jesus grieved even for us, for all the wounds and the losses each of us must bear. He felt and feels all of them, not to take them away from us but in order that we may know that the sorrow is shared. We are not alone.

“Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him and afflicted.” (Isaiah 53.4)

Jesus wept. I weep. If there are no new losses, I weep for old losses that come bubbling up from some private reservoir of grief. And I weep with and for others. Sometimes as I pray I weep, even to the point that I feel that in carrying another’s burden for that moment I am making it easier for them to pass through their shadow time. And there have even been times when tears have emerged from a depth that was not private, not even known. It has felt like I was tapping into an ocean of grief that belonged to more than just me and those people I love. But, the troubled waters of grief that I have dabbled a foot in, Jesus swam in. He was immersed in them. They flooded over him and threatened to consume him. When it says that Jesus wept, it means that Jesus really wept. None of us will ever be called upon to feel his sorrow.

From Lamentations 1.12:

“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look around and see. Is any suffering like my suffering that was inflicted on me in the day of His fierce anger?”

But, we will be called upon to feel our own grief.

Jesus wept. Who taught Jesus that part of the work of a real man was to weep? Just like he had to learn obedience by suffering, he had to learn that masculinity included mourning. Who taught him? I believe that the answer has to be that he learned it from another man. Only one man can teach another man what it means to be a man. Today we call such men models or mentors. They could be our fathers, but far too many of our fathers never learned themselves. Some were absent, some were broken, many had been swept up in distorted images of what it means to be a man. But, I believe, Jesus had a father who knew. Jesus knew what manhood was all about, and I believe he learned it from Joseph. From Joseph, Jesus learned that mourning is fundamental to manhood.

And what if a man cannot mourn?

What if no man ever taught him that weeping is manly? What if no one ever modeled for him that entering into the pain that is in the depth of all of our lives is the most courageous thing a man can ever do? What if instead, he heard only, “Big boys don’t cry,” “Only sissies cry,” “Stand up and take your licks like a man?” I once watched a John Wayne—type man coaching a child’s football practice. A small boy ended up at the bottom of the pile. He came up out of that pile wiping tears from his eyes. The coach screamed at him, “You’re a sniveling little girl!” That man knew nothing about being a real man. He was not a model nor a mentor. He was not even a good coach.

What if a man cannot mourn? What happens to a man who blocks a significant portion of the grief that life calls on him to feel? At best he lives disconnected from his feelings. His life is out of balance, a lot of brain or brawn and little heart or soul. At worst, such men become alcoholics. They become abusive as they project their pain on to others, generally weaker women and helpless children. They get ulcers and headaches. They die from workaholism, but cannot stop for a moment because to stop would require touching the pain. They become violent warmongers, hating an enemy so they will not hate themselves. I could go on with this, but there is a better way to answer the question, What if a man cannot mourn? Mark 14:32-42 tells us of Jesus’ great sorrow and of the disciples’ great failure.

“They went to a place called Gethsemane, and Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Sit here while I pray.’ He took Peter, James, and John along with him, and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,’ he said to them. ‘Stay here and keep watch.’ Going a little farther, he fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him. ‘Abba, Father,’ he said, ‘everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.’ Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. ‘Simon,’ he said to Peter, ‘are you asleep? Could you not keep watch for one hour? Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak.’ Once more he went away and prayed the same thing. When he came back, he again found them sleeping, because their eyes were heavy. They did not know what to say to him. Returning the third time, he said to them, ‘Are you still sleeping and resting? Enough! The hour has come. Look, the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise! Let us go! Here comes my betrayer! ‘“

Can we even begin to feel the anguish of this moment? If Jesus had been required to carry one more ounce of sorrow he would have died on the spot! In Luke’s version of the story it says that his sweat was like drops of blood. But, be sure you see this. Jesus did pass through this utterly black cloud of sorrow and came out on the other side with the faith to surrender to God’s will and the courage to face whatever had to be in his life.

What about the disciples? They slept instead of wept! Luke’s story says they were exhausted from sorrow. They could not deal with their grief, so they slept. They lost their courage utterly. And they fled in fear.

What if a man cannot mourn? He, according to this story, loses the faith to surrender and the courage to do God’s will. His manhood is short-circuited. He lives disconnected from masculine power, which is the power to face whatever comes. Blessed are men that mourn!

How will men reading these words receive them? Many, or most, of us were raised to be disconnected from our feelings. To read that weeping is integral to masculinity has got to seem strange at best and maybe completely out of touch with reality. But we are faced with the Biblical evidence. There is Jesus, bold faced in the scriptures, weeping wildly for the world. There is the man who is the ultimate model and mentor, and he is crying with loud cries as he prays for you and me. There is Jesus imagining himself as a mother hen who wishes to gather all her children to herself in order to comfort them in their sorrow. And what does the text say about the men, and others, Jesus seeks to comfort. They are not willing! Unwilling to mourn, they need no comfort. Too strong and tough to need a savior, they try to save themselves.

Jesus the weeper; Jesus the nurturer; he is trying to tell us something about what it means to be a man.

Midway into the process of writing this sermon, I suddenly got angry. “Why?” I found myself protesting, “Why was I never told all of this about Jesus?” “Why, if there are all of these texts about Jesus weeping, have I never heard them put into a sermon?” “Why have discussions of Christian manhood always proceeded as if these texts were not even in the Bible? How could they have been missed?”

Those are valid questions, but where did the anger come from?

Some years back, life descended into a depth of tears more consuming than I could have ever imagined possible for anyone, let alone myself. It took a long while before I could get a handle on what the grief was all about. For more than a year after my father’s death I had buried my pain. When that buried grief exploded through my defenses, I assumed I was going crazy, the exact thought, I now know, of most people who pass through some unrelenting grief. My anger said, “Why wasn’t there some male model, some mentor hanging around somewhere, to grab me and hold me and welcome me to the world of male grief; some man who could celebrate my initiation into the world of male power that comes when you pass through this dark and stormy cloud; some man who could tell me with authority, “It’s all right to cry”; some man who could hand me the Bible and read to me the stories of Jesus weeping and then tell me his own story and also tell me, “it will be all right”? We have a severe shortage in this world of such male mentors who care about our souls. One of the loses I grieve the most deeply is the loss of male models. Why was this part of the Biblical story never preached? After talking about this sermon with a friend, I asked that question in protest. He said to me, “The answer is in the Biblical story itself. The preachers and teachers and other Christian leaders who could have been mentors have been like the disciples who slept through their sorrow. They could not preach it because they did see it in the text. They did not see it in the text because they did not know it in their lives and because their culture said it was not there. Therefore, for them, it was not there.”

But it is there. It is there in the Bible, in the life of Jesus, and it is there in the life of men who have the courage to grieve the losses of their lives. Blessed are men that mourn. They feel the truth and they help other men to face the truth. Blessed are men that mourn.