June 5, 2007
The Beatitudes: Blessed are those who MournPosted by Bryan
Harold Kushner is a Rabbi. He gained prominence more than twenty years ago, he asked a question that millions of people prior to him had asked, but did so in a way that was different. Rather than simply ask a question, he placed his question in print, in the form of a book, and wrote out his struggle to arrive at a comfort-bringing conclusion.
Harold was a man whose wife bore him a son named Aaron. At about eight months old, Aaron stopped putting on weight. Then, at a year, Aaron's hair began falling out. Naturally, Harold and his wife became concerned, and began taking Aaron to different doctors all over New York, where they lived, and were told that their fears, while understandable, could be allayed. They informed the Kushners that Aaron would grow up normally, despite never growing tall, and would likely not have much hair.
The Kushners relocated to a suburb of Boston, where Harold was introduced to a local pediatrician who was researching children's growth problems. Shortly after Aaron’s third birthday, on the day his sister was born, the doctor came to the hospital and told the Kushner family that Aaron had progeria, or rapid aging. Aaron would never grow much beyond three feet in height, would have no hair on his head or body, would look like a little old man while he was still a child, and would die in his early teens.
Harold Kushner expressed in his book that he was devastated. Each year that they would celebrate his birthday, bittersweet emotions tainted the experience. Each joy was tempered with the understanding that the boy was inching ever closer to death. These events led Harold Kushner to ask the question and write the book with the same name, "Why do bad things happen to good people?"
This question, interestingly enough, was probably not a question that was asked back in the day where a crowd gathered at the feet of Jesus at the bottom of the mountain, found in Matthew 5. In that day, when bad things happened, it was almost without exception linked to sin. If a man was born blind, it was attributed to sin in his parent's life. If a person contracted leprosy, it was because of sin. If a person was poor, it was because that person was a sinner. The religious experts of the day, the Pharisees, determined themselves to be righteous and without sin because they were men of prominence and of prosperity. Their "rose colored spectacles" made it easy to misdiagnose the problem of every downtrodden person with a case of Sin manifested in every malady.
However, the crowd that Jesus attracted was not a Pharasaic club of elitists. The masses that followed Jesus were the sinners. They were the poor. They were the scab-ridden, the hobblers, the beggars, the losers. They were people who, for their whole life, wanted a legitimate answer to the question, "Why do all these bad things keep happening to us?"
To be fair, they were probably asking the question better back then than today, because they never presumed themselves to be "good people." They had been told their entire lives that bad things happened to them because they were bad people.
Today, perhaps the pendulum has swung way too far in the other direction. Now, everyone is assumed to be a "good person." Today, to be considered "good," you just have to avoid killing people, eating babies, or kidnapping children. By virtue of a self-applied label, too many people seem to think that means they deserve to be shocked when bad things happen to them. This, for the record, is as unbiblical as the opposite extreme perpetuated by the Pharisees.
Yet, good or bad. The problem still persists. Bad things happen to good people...every single day.
The reality is, things happen because you are a person. Not because you are a good person. Not because you are a bad person. But because you are a person who lives in a world that is filled with sin, filled with bad things; accordingly, you are subject to bad things happening to you from time to time.
Some people, like the folks who had gathered around Jesus, seemed to be receiving, at least from a human perspective, more than their "fair share" of bad things. It seems like a lot of these people had been so long removed from a good thing happening in their life, that if something good had happened to them, they likely either wouldn't have recognized it or assumed it meant that only a REALLY bad thing was coming, since good times never came to stay.
Maybe you can identify with that mindset. It seems like bad things are happening in bunches. It seems that the bad things that are happening are a lot worse and a lot more frequent than the good times. You might feel like the cartoon guy where the storm cloud is always over your head, and every time you reach out for something good, the cloud either douses you with a rainstorm or zaps you with a bolt of lightning.
Well, that is who these people were, and it seems like they were in a constant state of mourning. And it is to them that Jesus addresses these words: "Bblessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."
Remember, knowing that there is a promise of God bestowed upon you because you are identified by a particular need allows, enables, and empowers you to have a beautiful attitude in that given circumstance.
In the posts that follow, you will see how God comforts people just like you in your mourning.
June 5, 2007 2:39 PM