Matthew 5:4

οἱ πενθοῦντες. Who are they? All who on any account grieve? Then this Beatitude would give utterance to a thoroughgoing optimism. Pessimists say that there are many griefs for which there is no remedy, so many that life is not worth living. Did Jesus mean to meet this position with a direct negative, and to affirm that there is no sorrow without remedy? If not, then He propounds a puzzle provoking thoughtful scholars to ask: What grief is that which will without fail find comfort? There can be no comfort where there is no grief, for the two ideas are correlative. But in most cases there is no apparent necessary connection. Necessary connection is asserted in this aphorism, which gives us a clue to the class described as οἱ πενθοῦντες. Their peculiar sorrow roust be one which comforts itself, a grief that has the thing it grieves for in the very grief. The comfort is then no outward good. It lies in a right state of soul, and that is given in the sorrow which laments the lack of it. The sorrow reveals love of the good, and that love is possession. In so far as all kinds of sorrow tend to awaken reflection on the real good and ill of human life, and so to issue in the higher sorrow of the soul, the second Beatitude may be taken absolutely as expressing the tendency of all grief to end in consolation. παρακληθήσονται, future. The comfort is latent in the very grief, but for the present there is no conscious joy, but only poignant sorrow. The joy, however, will inevitably come to birth. No noble nature abides permanently in the house of mourning. The greater the sorrow, the greater the ultimate gladness, the “joy in the Holy Ghost” mentioned by St. Paul among the essentials of the Kingdom of God (Romans 14:17).