This is a transcription of an audio recording, so you lose a bit in the translation..
Sorrow - surely if there is anything that we would not expect to bring joy it is sorrow. It is as though Christ said, “Happy are the unhappy.” We are tempted to say, “Lord, what do you mean?” But we know this is one place where experience is not only the best, but it is about the only teacher. Truly this symbolizes the cross. It is the trials that God sends us. But I wish to distinguish because, remember we are talking about joy, and we are stuck with our vocabulary. What else can we do? We can wave our arms or shake our heads in communicating ideas. We found a convenient method on making strange sounds through the orifice called the mouth. And people hear it, and they get ideas. So making strange sounds.
The sorrow which Christ gives us, accept and patiently endured is not sadness. What is the difference? In both cases of course there is pain, but though I am sorrowful the reason (it is always objective) that in effect it means psychologically or subjectively between a sad person and a person weighed down with sorrow, well I might not be able to tell the difference. They both seem to be, well, under a heavy burden. But there is a big difference. It all depends on what we are morning about. Which is legitimate sorrow and it is not (to coin a word) illegitimate sadness.
Our best paradigm for this is Christ Himself. What are the two occasions, which our Savior wept? He wept over Jerusalem; he wept at the grave of Lazareth. Was that it? As far as I can tell that was it. Now as we know the gospels are revelatory not only in what Christ taught, but also in what He did. In this case, His tears are a revelation. Not that He wept, which showed that He was human, but the reasons why He wept.
Authentic sorrow therefore, which is one of the conditions for happiness, is sorrow over sin and sorrow over loss of those we love, which is a sign of love. Let’s take the second first. It is not wrong, and you should not consider it weakness, either in ourselves or in others, and to develop a sensitivity (I don’t want you to anticipate what I am going to talk about yet) but to recognize there is a genuine beauty about weeping over the loss of a loved one. I don’t mean unrestrained sorrow. But the sorrow, which means bereavement, may indeed be tinged with some self-interest because the loved one I will no longer have. But it can also be deeply self-less.
In other words I have come to love someone very dearly and that person is gone. A sensitivity to other people’s sorrow over their loss of loved ones is of God. But secondly, the sorrow that is born of sorrow for sins, this is Christ. Christ wept over Jerusalem because Jerusalem had as we know rejected Him and with Him its promise of salvation. He also sorrowed as we know, over both the sin of Jerusalem and the sufferings. The fall of Jerusalem as a consequence of sin.
So you might say there are three kinds of authentic sorrow blessed by God. The sorrow of bereavement, the sorrow over sin, the sorrow over the sufferings of others knowing that not all people profit from their sufferings, and my compassion goes out to those who are in pain. What a sentence! Sadness is every other kind of mourning. It is essentially selfish, sadness. Sadness is the sorrow (to use that word) over things that don’t deserve to be mourned over. And while we may and should indeed sorrow, we are forbidden to be sad. Sadness when yielded to is a sin. Sorrow within the limits we have described is a virtue.
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