Not long after my son and daughter-in-law completed their doctorates and got married, they moved out of state for her to take a full-time job as a university instructor. My wife and I helped them clean and pack up their apartment, then they stayed with us for a month, awaiting the move. When the day finally came, we said our tearful goodbyes in the living room. I distinctly remember watching them get into their overstuffed car, drive up the street, and disappear around the corner.

I felt blue for the next couple of days; it would be a while before we would see them again. But I knew that we would see them again, eventually. What would it have been like to watch them leave if I had known that they would never come back, that we would never meet again? Indeed, what would it have been like if they had been taken from us by force, instead of leaving on their own accord to pursue their personal goals and dreams?

Such questions help me to imagine in a small way the emotional import of Micah’s dire prophecy to Jerusalem. We’ve seen how the prophet uses an ominous form of wordplay to foretell the disaster that would befall his childhood stomping grounds. Micah brings that heartbreak to Jerusalem, telling them to mourn for their own children:

Shave your head in mourning
    for the children in whom you delight;
make yourself as bald as the vulture,
    for they will go from you into exile. (Mic 1:16, NIV)

Vultures are bald; some believe that this is to keep bits of dead flesh from sticking to their heads as they feed (I know, gross). But what the NIV translates as “vulture” is usually translated as “eagle.” What we call a “bald eagle” isn’t really bald — we call it that because its head is starkly white compared to the rest of its body.

In Micah’s time, people in mourning might shave a portion of their head as an outward sign of their grief. But Micah is saying, No, people, shave it all off. Don’t leave a hair on your head, until your entire head is gleaming white. Your mourning will be that great, that severe, for the children you love are going to be carried off into exile, and they’re not coming back. For the southern kingdom of Judah, Babylon, not Assyria, would be the aggressor. And though Jerusalem wouldn’t fall until a century after Micah, the prophet foresaw it, and grieved.

Passages like these help us understand the depth of what Jesus meant when he said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Matt 5:4). From an Old Testament perspective, much of mourning has to do with exile. It’s not just the loss of a loved one, though as Micah suggests, that’s part of it. It’s the loss of a dream, of an identity, of an inheritance — of everything that came with being the people of God living in the land of promise.

And it is grief over sin: the recognition that our fate is the result of our own stubborn disobedience. We had what our ancestors had waited for, what they had fought for. We took it for granted; we took God for granted. And then it was all taken away. Will we ever get it back?

Blessed are those who mourn, because they know the truth: human beings are sinful, needy souls who cannot take their inheritance for granted. They are blessed because they know the gift they have been given in Jesus, and live in gratitude and awe.