Blessed Are the Mentally Ill
Good News from Jesus for the Anxious and Weary
I was barely old enough to shave the first time a panic attack dropped my clammy body onto the floor. My heart started racing out of my chest, my vision began to go dark, and the back of my knees went cold with nervous beads of sweat before I awoke to a confused crowd of people looking down at me. A few weeks later, my new psychiatrist handed me the name of my first diagnosed mental illness: panic disorder. I had no way of telling you then what I most needed to hear, but I do now. Jesus said it first to a crowd of people whose lives had overwhelmed their minds, bodies, and hope. He gave them good news they had every reason not to expect. The church should never stop finding direct ways to say that same good news to those who need it most.
I’ll start with what I would have loved to hear on the way home from that psychiatrist’s office:
Blessed Are the Mentally Ill.
When Jesus opens the Sermon on the Mount, he does it by listing eight categories of people he says are blessed. They were not the people his original audience would have guessed were blessed. The poor in spirit. Those who mourn. The meek. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. The merciful. The pure in heart. The peacemakers. The persecuted. We have a name for the list. We call them the Beatitudes.
We almost always read them wrong.
We read them as commands. As if Jesus is saying, here are the eight kinds of people I want you to be, so go become them. Spend more time sobbing about all the loss and grief there is around you. Find yourself so oppressed that your body cries out for justice the way a starving man’s body cries out for bread and water. Be the best at being humble. As if the kingdom of heaven is the prize at the end of an obstacle course made out of performative postures we have to learn to fake in order to impress God.
This isn’t the way the language works in the original Greek, however, and it simply isn’t what Jesus is doing here. The Beatitudes are not assignments. They are announcements. They are Gospel. Good news. Jesus is echoing Isaiah 61 by declaring how God’s inbreaking reign, happening through his very life and ministry, is indescribably good news to a very specific group of people. He is pronouncing grace over people who are already weary and anxious.
Jesus isn’t laying heavy burdens on top of already heavy-burdened people so that they know how to experience God and receive his love. He is pronouncing a verdict over the people who are beaten and battered by letting everyone know that a new variable has entered into the equation the world uses to calculate who is “in luck” and who is “out of luck.” The new variable has a name: Jesus, the Father’s eternal Son, announcing and enacting the long-awaited kingdom in the power of the Spirit. The math has seriously changed.
The mourners are blessed because Jesus is at work and a world of darkness will be receiving long overdue divine comfort. The meek are blessed because the God who took on flesh in Jesus, and who lives in his church through the Spirit, is in the business of giving the earth back to the people the strong have walked over. The kingdom does not arrive at the end of a self-improvement program. It arrives as a gift, Lamb-stained and cross-shaped, for those who are at the very end of their rope.
This matters for everyone reading this, but it matters in a particular way for the nearly one in four American adults living with mental illness, and for the nearly half of American adolescents who do. Almost half of us, sometime in our lives, will be given a name for something uninvited or unexpected that is happening inside our brains and minds and bodies. The Beatitudes were spoken for the people who needed to hear them the most. For the ones, like me, who may have a list of fifteen worst-case scenarios memorized for any given Tuesday.
It’s hard for you to know how important this is to me without some more vulnerability. I was sixteen when I brought that panic disorder diagnosis home. They weren’t the occasional panic attacks, either. They were the recurring, crippling kind. I learned a new word: agoraphobia. I understood it to mean that an invisible but impenetrable wall had been built around the perimeter of my childhood home. I could not walk outside without my brain and body initiating an “all-systems-go” panic attack. The rest of the world had become entirely too dangerous to my very delicate nervous system.
After the panic attacks came the major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder diagnoses, both of which have stayed with me in a more impactful way for much longer than the acute anxiety episodes. I have what doctors call “refractory depression,” or, more plainly, treatment-resistant depression, which means I have tried almost every medication and almost every therapy and found only little to moderate relief in any one of them. There is still real work being done looking for evidence-based treatments for this type of depression. The science on most of them is still very young, but I am a follower of Jesus, so I live in hope.
I tell you all that because the church I led for many years needed to hear it from me before anyone else would say it out loud. I’ve noticed that the more honestly I talk about mental health from a stage, or even just online, the more other people feel like they can talk about it as well. And I tell it now because I want you to know that the rest of this essay is not theory. I do not write about mental illness the way someone might write about a country they have read about but never visited. I know the best Mexican food restaurants, the coolest views, the worst freeways, and the cities to avoid. This is a map for receiving the blessings of Jesus in the country of mental illness, written by someone who lives there.
So let me give you a quick tour of three places I have learned to trust.
The first is the overlook, where I can see a truth so large that my words start to feel too small for it: blessed are the mentally ill because in Jesus we are loved before we are diagnosed.
Our diagnoses are real. They are not imaginary, and they are not irrelevant. But they can become a little fenced-in plot of land we mistake for the whole world. We can force ourselves to live there, or be forced to live there, until the diagnosis becomes not only something true about us but the truest thing about us.
The gospel lifts our eyes.
In the incarnation, the eternal Son of God joined himself to human nature, all of it, not just the parts we know how to admire. At the cross, he descended still further. Together, they announce that we are loved further down than any diagnosis could ever go. What is most true of us is not what shows up in MyChart, and it is not exhausted by what can be named in the DSM-5. What is most true of us is the love of the Triune God for his image-bearers, the love revealed at the cross of his Son, the love poured out by his Spirit.
Hold the diagnosis. Hold the deeper claim. Refuse to let either one swallow the other.
The second place is the shelter. Where the overlook teaches us that we are loved before we are diagnosed, the shelter teaches us that we were never meant to carry our burdens alone. Blessed are the mentally ill because the kingdom of Jesus creates a people among whom they no longer have to hide.
This means the church has to become the kind of place where this announcement is visibly true. A place where people can be honest without being reduced to what they confess. A place where theology does not rush past suffering. A place where prayer and therapy are not treated as enemies. A place where people whose suffering is not neat, tidy, or useful for a conversion video can believe that the kingdom of heaven is for them, not as a sentiment, but as a place.
There is a lot of repair to do here. The church has too often been one of the places where people learned to hide their mental illness rather than name it. That is on us. The work of becoming a community where the Beatitudes are visibly true for the anxious and weary is the actual ministry, not a side project. Concrete ministries carry good news in unmistakable language. What if a church covered the cost of someone’s therapy the same way it covers the cost of their funeral? The church could actually become good news people can touch.
The third place is the road, where if you look far enough ahead, you can find more than enough hope for the day. Blessed are the mentally ill because they belong to a future of healing and resurrection.
Not every road in this country gets easier quickly. Some of them remain steep for longer than anyone wants to admit. But Christian hope is not a white-knuckled denial of the road beneath our feet. It is a grounded kind of hope. Some days, hope is not a sunrise. It is a mile marker. It does not make the road flat, but it tells you the road is not endless.
The Holy Spirit is still at work in our exhausted bodies, our misfiring brain circuitry, our half-spoken prayers, and our long attempts at therapy and rest and friendship. Hope does not promise that the diagnosis will lift this year. Hope promises that the One who made these bodies and took on a body himself is making all things new, and that the making-new includes the parts of us that misfire, the parts of us that go silent, and the parts of us that no longer know how to be still.
I want to close where Jesus closes, not with an imperative or a neat application but with an announcement that opens a door rather than a command that closes one.
Blessed are the mentally ill,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.Blessed are those who lay out their medications each morning and each evening,
for they shall wake to bodies the risen Christ has made new.Blessed are those whose shopping ends in the dairy aisle,
for they shall be seated at the marriage supper of the Lamb.Blessed are those whose minds rehearse every possible sorrow,
for they shall inherit a world where fear has no work left to do.Blessed are those who live with bipolar disorder,
for the God we know in Jesus assumed what they feel in order to heal it.
Blessed are those whose bodies remember what their minds cannot speak,
for the One who bore wounds in his own body will raise theirs.Blessed are those who suffer alone in rooms no one has entered,
for the One forsaken on a cross will draw near.Blessed are those who have hidden their diagnosis in the house of God,
for they shall be called by name in the family of God.Blessed are those overcome with a desire to take their own life,
for they shall be overcome by the loving desire of the One who gave his life for theirs.Blessed are the mentally ill,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Notes and Further Reading
The reading of the Beatitudes as announcements rather than assignments is most clearly defended in Jonathan T. Pennington’s The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing (Baker Academic, 2017). Pennington’s argument from the Greek and from the wisdom tradition has reshaped how a generation of pastors reads Matthew 5.
The canonical Christian memoir on mental illness from inside theological vocation is Kathryn Greene-McCreight’s Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness (Brazos, second edition 2015). If anything in this essay rang true, that book will sit close.
Sarah Griffith Lund’s Blessed Are the Crazy: Breaking the Silence About Mental Illness, Family, and Church (Chalice Press, 2014) comes at the same territory from a different angle. Lund is a pastor who grew up loving family members with severe mental illness, including her father, brother, and cousin. Her book is memoir and churchwide call in one: it includes a study guide and practical steps for developing a mental health ministry in your congregation. If Greene-McCreight is the theologian writing from inside her own diagnosis, Lund is the pastor writing from inside the family.
Diane Langberg’s Suffering and the Heart of God (New Growth Press, 2015) is the steadiest pastoral theology I know for the church that wants to be a real home for the anxious and weary, not just a sympathetic visitor.
On the theology of holy ignorance and refusing to over-explain suffering, Chris Green’s Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think About the Divine Matters (Cascade, 2018) is the right deep-end book. This is the profound yet accessible book that I would hand a friend who has just been told something about God and their suffering that made them doubt God’s character or their own faith.
If you arrived at this piece carrying something heavier than words: the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, any hour of the day or night.
You are not alone in the country of mental illness.
Mike Skinner is the founder of Cruciform Hope Ministries, where he writes about where mental illness and the Christian faith meet. He has spent nearly two decades in pastoral ministry, currently serves as a chaplain to interdenominational high school students, and holds a Master of Arts in Theological Studies.