Ecclesiastes 7:2-4 – Mourning is Better than Pleasure

2 It is better to go to a house of mourning
than to go to a house of feasting,
for death is the destiny of every man;
the living should take this to heart.
3 Sorrow is better than laughter,
because a sad face is good for the heart.
4 The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure.

Jesus offers us a similar thought in the Beatitude found in Matthew 5:4 where he tells us that we are blessed if we mourn.

I suppose that it would not be healthy to go around dwelling on all the bad things that happen to me, my family, my community, my nation or my world. What I learn from these verses, is that it is just as bad to refuse to acknowledge that there are bad things to which the proper response is to mourn.

Jesus wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus (John 11:35). I believe that Jesus was weeping not only because of Lazarus’ untimely death, but for death that was not supposed to be. We were not designed to die, have disease and sickness, be harassed by “natural” disasters or in any other way experience pain and suffering.

Yet, for now, we are to experience all of these with the realization that this is not our permanent state. We are to mourn over the way things are with the hope that in Jesus we and our world can be redeemed.