What does Jesus mean by that?
I’ve got a new article out at Mere Orthodoxy exploring this saying of Jesus. This is one of those flashes of inspiration I had, sat in a conference that was expounding why it’s a difficult saying, three different books I’d read collided in my head. It took me a while to actually work out the piece and say something meaningful.
These are themes that will be familiar to regular readers: suffering, maturity, and the link between them.
Here’s the first paragraph:
“The beatitudes are beautiful, we can all agree, but sometimes they feel inscrutable. It’s not immediately obvious how you live the life they describe, and it doesn’t take long in the literature to discover that there isn’t agreement on whether they describe a life you should be living. Several of them seem strange to the average Christian. To focus on just one, why is it blessed to mourn? Young Christians I know have suggested to me their confusion, especially because they’ve been taught that Christians are supposed to be full of joy. “Rejoice in the Lord always,” Paul says in Philippians 4:4. These feel like contradictory instructions. Surely mourning is passing away with this world and so is not a Christian attitude we should attempt to develop?”
If you’d like to read more, you can find the article here. It’s timed appropriately for Lent, providentially.
Photo by Guy Basabose on Unsplash
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