Is grief good? Why does tragedy turn some folks ugly and makes others beautiful?

Why did the tragedy in King David’s life give us the Psalms, and the tragedy in Solomon’s give us only vanity. My dad lived some of his most effective years of ministry after losing his wife, my mom, in a tragic car accident 16 years ago.  On the other hand, there is a man I know who lost his wife and seems to have lost his very soul. 

Once Jesus said “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4).  I used to think of this verse as a nice axiom roughly equivalent to “Blessed are they that skin their knees for they will get a lollipop” -- sort of a Christian version of karma to tell us it is ok when bad things happen because we will be cheered up later.

But . . . since bad things really do happen to all of us, perhaps Jesus isn’t saying blessed are those who have bad things happen to them, but blessed are those who mourn about those bad things.  It’s as if we have a choice to mourn or not mourn over the bad things we all face.

So how do you choose to mourn? 

After looking at about 15 other translations and the Greek, I discovered that the word “mourn” basically means “mourn,” so where else can I look?

Once when Jesus was discussing the tragedy of a man born blind, some folks asked him whose fault it was, his own or his parents.  Jesus said, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3).  Blaming and deciding whose fault it is – that’s not so important. That’s not mourning. The proper response to bad things involves your transformation, the exercise of the glory of God in you.

The same is true in Job.  They spend the whole book arguing about whose fault it is.  Job was right.  God says so at the end, but, that doesn’t seem to be the main point.  There is a work of transformation to be done in Job.  The climax in chapter 40 gets me every time. Job falls down with his hand on his mouth and surrenders all his theology and impeccable logic; then as if looking up through his tears he says, “I had heard of you, but now I have seen you.”  The man was correct before, but now he is transformed… comforted, blessed. 

What would have happened if Job had just accepted the explanation of his friends, or, for that matter, if they would have accepted his?  They would have been like a lot of Christians that say, “Just have faith and be happy,” correct but not comforted.

No, something tells me mourning involves more – perhaps silence, quite a bit of fog, some tears, not a lot of logic, no judgment, an emptying, an inner death. 

Then the Comforter comes.