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?
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