My New Year’s Resolution? More Crying

I am not usually one for New Year’s resolutions, but I thought I’d give it a try this year. My resolution? More tears.

I’ll put the gym membership off for another year, keep the low-sugar recipes on the shelf a little while longer, and press ‘pause’ on my long-running goal of drinking less coffee. But one thing that can’t wait: more weeping. More crying. More tears. More mourning.

That may sound strange. Wouldn’t a promise to go to bed earlier, exercise more, or eat more broccoli lead to a happier 2025? Not if I take Jesus at his word in the beatitudes – or ‘blessings’ – that open his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5. ‘Blessed are you who weep’, Jesus says. ‘For you will be comforted’.

The word ‘beatitude’ comes from the Latin ‘beatus’, and is connected to the word that is usually translated as ‘blessed’ in our English Bibles but could also be written ‘happy’ or ‘greatly honoured’. The writer and theologian of spirituality Eugene Peterson translated it simply as ‘lucky’. The eight beatitudes that start off Jesus’ most famous sermon, then, are a list of those who are blessed, greatly honoured, happy in Jesus’ upside-down kingdom of cross-shaped love, relationship-restoring justice, and radical grace. Why would Jesus include the mourners and tearful as ‘blessed’ in this list? 

Those who are vulnerable enough to weep are also usually brave enough to see their world for what it really is.

I wonder if it’s because those who are vulnerable enough to weep are also usually brave enough to see their world for what it really is. That is often why the mourners’ eyes are brimming with tears. They’ve looked the world hard in the face, seen just how broken things are, and they can’t help but grieve.

In the recent show ‘Shrinking’ (spoiler alert!), the main character – a therapist - expends all sorts of energy healing those around him: his clients, his friends, his boss, his daughter. It becomes clear as the show progresses that he is spending all this energy helping others in part because he is avoiding the pain of his own wife’s tragic death. In the final episode, he realizes that he can no longer outrun his pain. He must face the world as it is – his wife is really and finally gone - and we see him sitting on a park bench with his friend and fellow therapist, weeping and saying ‘I’m not okay’.

We, too, can so easily spend a lot of energy avoiding the hard reality of our world instead of admitting that things – and that we – are not okay. Children dying in warzones in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan. Thousands of people sleeping on the street in my home city of Edmonton. Political and cultural discourse moving us farther and farther from each other, unwilling to see each other as fellow humans in need of care, grace, and welcome – even (or especially?) in the church. A groaning creation whose suffering is evident in raging wildfires, species loss, and rising sea levels. 

They’ve had the courage to notice the suffering of God’s world are ‘blessed’, and will be comforted in God’s here-and-coming kingdom. 

Like the character in Shrinking, we may avoid those realities by ‘doing good’. But sooner or later, somewhere in our journey, we need to be brave enough to see what is really going on. We need to be able to see what is being lost in our changing climate, the lives that aren’t flourishing because of persistent poverty, and the futures being destroyed because of war. That kind of seeing is difficult. It will probably lead to tears. But Jesus says that those who are willing to let their eyes well up with tears because they’ve had the courage to notice the suffering of God’s world are ‘blessed’, and will be comforted in God’s here-and-coming kingdom. 

I wonder if the mourners are also blessed because they’ve started the journey to hope. 

We don’t cultivate hope by telling ourselves that things aren’t as bad as they look, or by refusing to look at things altogether. We cultivate hope first by recognizing that the world God loves is deeply broken and worth crying over. And those tears can then open us to imagine a different world: a world in which God’s love, justice, welcome, and joy are possible. As Walter Brueggemann puts it in his book Reality, Grief, Hope, “It is, I judge, a prophetic task to break . . . denial, and that can only be done by honest, public acknowledgement that takes the form of grief.” It is those acts of grief – ‘blessed are those who weep!’ – that open the door to what Brueggemann calls a prophetic hope which “insists that the circumstance of failure [have] not defeated God’s capacity to generate new possibility”.

And so this year, I want to be brave enough to see what is really happening in God’s good but groaning world, as painful as that is. This year, my resolution is more tears – crying for the sake of God’s kingdom.

Photo by W W