Preparing Zion - D&C 37:3; 38:4, 27

 

I say unto you, be one; and if ye are not one ye are not mine.

Whenever God has had a people on the earth, there has been both a symbolic and a real connection between place and covenant. Adam and Eve lost their garden of Eden, but knew that covenants with the prophesied Savior would restore them and their posterity to a place of peace. Noah's flood prepared the earth for a covenant people; Melchizedek's city of peace--Salem, forerunner of less ancient Jerusalem--was a refuge for the righteous; Abraham first, and Moses a half millennium later were both promised a promised land. Jaredites, Lehites, and Mulekites from the Book of Mormon record all were guided by God to a promised land as well. All of the ancient prophets involved understood that covenant living under Christ required several elements: a law revealed from heaven connecting behavior with principles, administered by authority, welding the spiritual with the economic, with the political, with the social, and with the psychological. Individuals had to covenant individually, and had to conform to a God who asked them to love others as He loves them--in a self-sacrificial manner--so that the group identity ensured horizontal equality, and oneness in vertical orientation.

Jesus Himself also taught the principles of a Zion-like society, inaugurating the Church as its vehicle, with love as its key. His New Testament (more accurately rendered New Covenant) teaching was a love of one another, the Greek of which suggests love of believers for other believers, not necessarily a generalized love with no distinction. After His resurrection, He revealed further implementation instructions to His apostles, who instituted an economic order as a component of the spiritual life of the Church--a practice of having all things in common (Acts 2:44-45), in which property was submitted to the church, which administered to needs through inspired redistribution of pooled resources.

As Joseph Smith had begun to receive revelation on textual corrections to the King James Version's biblical text, he had recently refined text from Genesis, later separated into the Pearl of Great Price book of Moses, to broaden the lessons available from the original Zion--Enoch's city. Until that revelatory work, connecting the term Zion to a city that predated David's capture of Jerusalem is available only through extra-biblical sources: non-canonical rabbinical, apocryphal, and pseudepigraphal. These flesh out Enoch's connection to a group of 800,000 who refused to leave as Enoch was taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire, granting a wider pseudo-historical dimension to the symbolic meanings the "city of God" gathered throughout the Psalms, Isaiah, and other poetic and prophetic Old Testament writings which saw Zion as Jerusalem, not the name of a previous city of God. The broader Christian world readily connected Zion past Jerusalem, extending the metaphor to cover the "people" of God occupying a symbolic, non-literal space. But now, with this Doctrine and Covenants section, early saints of the Restored Gospel could re-frame the terms, and incorporate the gathering of Israel literally back to the physical Jerusalem with a longer pattern--a gathering to a more abstract set of potential lands of promise. Before Jerusalem's Zion, there was Enoch's, and now there could be maybe Kirtland!

With these newly revealed elements freshly on his mind, the biblical pattern became clearer, and it must have been less surprising to Smith than to the early restored Christians he led when the revelation came down before the organization's first birthday back on earth. There needed to be a specific place of gathering, a set of endowments of "power from on high", and a new ordering of social and economic affairs packaged together with the collective identity of becoming the covenant people. Learning the detail that Zion wasn't merely a metaphor for an eternal gathering place, but was a repeated "promised land" concept that could be brought about in the material world as much as in the spiritual one, the "wisdom" that every man should "choose for himself" whether and how to implement was to "assemble together at the Ohio" where a small, but robust contingent of new converts awaited (D&C 37:3-4).

The gathering commandment exposed some more than others--those with deeper economic roots and more complicated finances would have to sell, rent, or abandon property. Property that was likely hard won, recently cleared, and barely profitable for sale over winter months. It placed more of a material burden on those with more stake in growing where already planted, and comprised a test of faith for the fledgling few.

And this inequality of burden was a central part of what the text of Section 38 addressed. The Lord, through his prophet, shared for the first published time that Enoch's city of Zion was taken up into His bosom, as are all who covenant to become clean through His blood. And as the saints were to assemble in Ohio, there was an implicit parallel drawn (that many may have mistaken for a direct parallel) between the Kirtland where they eventually built a temple, and the kind of "promised land" that the scriptural pattern that Enoch's city was the newest best example of could apply to them. This would require preparations, sacrifices, and personal work, but it would have the effect of blessing those who sacrificed and would also have the effect of physically separating the world--worthy of judgment as it was--from the righteous seekers of relationships of oneness with Christ.

The problem is that oneness with Christ requires oneness with His attitudes, and those hit the "haves" with a double whammy: not only does He have a positive compassion for the poor, He negates privilege and status through a negative flattening--being no respecter of persons. Those who He has blessed with material abundance are under a disproportional burden, and a paradoxical commandment: turn more over to Him, and prosperity will continue more abundant. Principles have no proportions in their application, even if they sometimes do in their impact, and being no respecter of persons, like the Lord, means letting Him give the laws and the means, turning over both will and property in faith.

Now don't get me wrong--private property is still a valid principle, and being willing to deed it all away isn't the same thing as a vow of poverty. Sufficient for sustenance and increase is to be deeded back, so that individuals are responsible for their effort in magnifying their stewardship. But the stewardship principle is the operative one here: all property is the Lord's, and the faithful will do better with the sacred trust He allows them to invest than they would if it were their own property. Stewards tend to act wisely, and actively, yet humbly, with gratitude for temporary privileges form their Lord, and in the long view of all the stakeholders, rather than the narrow short-term interests they might if they were owners.

Zion requires more than membership, it requires that each member of the group consecrate themselves--uphold high standards that prevent dragging the whole group down, and contribute actively with a high degree of care for one another. And this group of new saints were not ready. But they were being led toward readiness. There's no way they could have known what sacrifices their consecration would require, but they could begin to prepare for it through obedience--moving to Ohio--listening to parables, instructions, and teachings pointing them toward economic equality, toward personal worthiness, and toward selfless service in following Christ's pattern. They didn't yet know that Zion was the "pure in heart," but their actions in heed of the prophet, in self-denial, and in looking out for the poor among them were preparing their hearts. The safety and power from on high that was promised was coming, but the onslaught from the outside was also coming, and only those prepared could expect the conditional promise to hold--"if ye are prepared, ye shall not fear" (v. 30).

And how does this preparation come about? Notice the warning and binary language throughout the section. Notice the clarity of blessings for membership, and cursings for all other choices that aren't oriented toward his all-in covenant belonging. Notice that there is a command to physically gather, but that it's coming with promises of power, of a law to be given, of new appointees to be called, and of a new arrangement ordering the "property" of the church.

And notice the parable at the center of it all, teaching those with ears to hear in the same manner the Lord deployed during His earthly ministry. The binarity of not being His unless we are one in Him is the exegetical conclusion drawn from the following text:

What man among you having twelve sons, and is no respecter of them, and they serve him obediently, and he saith unto the one: Be thou clothed in robes and sit thou here; and to the other: Be thou clothed in rags and sit thou there—and looketh upon his sons and saith I am just? Behold, this I have given unto you as a parable, and it is even as I am.

The obvious injustice of rewarding equally faithful sons with unequal material and social position is the valid point to draw from the surface of the parable. But as readers think of how it applies, the facile comparison between the robes and rags and REWARDS breaks down. Robes versus rags describes the initial conditions of current members of the Church. It corresponds not to the end state, but to the starting point God has brought us down to earth with--inequalities abound. The lesson of the parable, and of the unity of the covenant people isn't in how we reward faith--the fairness of our rewards has to be the given here--but in how we erase the inequalities of our initial conditions, in how we flatten "respect of persons."

The problem with group unity is that it only takes one individual to break it definitively. It requires each individual to direct the diversity of strengths each one brings to the benefit of the whole. A single fish swimming to the side makes the school more vulnerable to predators in the water. But if we can obey God's commandments to temporarily sacrifice our means or our pride in our position, and "look to the poor and needy, and administer to their relief that they shall not suffer," He will reward those that seek it with His more permanent riches, perhaps even the earthly ones with which we can see to our own and others' temporal needs.

These saints have no idea what's in store for them. Collectively, they will fail to reestablish Zion. But many will learn lessons and reap eternal rewards that allow the core faithful to continue and grow--like Daniel's stone cut from the mountain without hands--to fill the whole earth. And the work of gathering Zion hasn't diminished or fundamentally changed in principle, only in form. Our task now is to build on these preparatory counsels: love our brothers like ourselves, impart of our substance one to another, grow together by each growing toward Christ. It's the model of the Godhead, and it applies in our marriages, our families, our church congregations, and even in our various polities. To be truly His, we have to be truly one. To be truly His, we have to pledge our all to Him--our will and our property. To be truly His, we have to be willing to allow Him to cut away our drag, whatever that might be, and instead let Him magnify our force to the benefit of the whole. And that might make us new creatures, bring us knowledge of talents we never knew we had, take us places we never thought we'd go. But love will fill us, blessings will accompany us, and no power will prevail against us when we are one, when we are His. He has laws, moral prescriptions, manners of operation, hierarchically organized appointees, physical spaces dedicated for His services, ordinances, and even economic commandments as elements of His Order. He can make more of us than we can make of ourselves, both individually and collectively. All we have to do is let Him use us as His ingredients. All we have to do is let Him cook.

Questions and Doubts

 Two quick notes on interactions with individuals after the Resurrection of the Savior.

1. Mary Magdalene was first to the scene of the empty tomb. Of all the Lord's disciples, she got up earliest in the morning, she came to offer devotions, she demonstrated faith in His importance. But she, like them all, had no understanding of the miracle of His resurrection. Her first move upon seeing an empty tomb--empty of the corpse that was lying there the night before, but with the linens carefully folded--was to run to tell the huddling and despairing apostles what she witnessed. Peter and John came running and saw what she saw, but as they left, according to John's account (John 20), Mary remained, in shock, pouring out her tears and emotions of loss and love in grief for the missing Lord. It seems she was not crumpled as the artistic renderings often have it, but standing and even moving as she wept, until, at one point, she stooped and her gaze met with two angels inside the tomb. Now, I don't know about you, but I think if I ever encountered an angel of glory, I'd be a little like Mary and let them have the first word. They were aware of her presence, and surely of her thoughts as well, but their opening communication wasn't to deliver a message, it was to attend to her emotional state. Their reaction to her arrival was to ask why she was crying. This gave her a chance to express the emotion verbally, to deal with it by externalizing it, and this prepared her mind and heart to hear the message she would later hear of His resurrection. That message would be delivered instead by the Risen Lord Himself, who was observing this interaction from behind her without her knowledge, and also who, despite already knowing her emotional state better than she herself could even articulate, chose to make His first words attention to her feelings, asking what the angels also just did: why weepest thou? Our Lord knows better than anyone how we feel. He asks us to follow Him no matter how we feel, but His perfect includes a perfect compassion. He asked Mary twice, through His servants and then through His own voice to give a reason for her sorrow, to subordinate her heart's unspoken remorse to the Word, whose rational power did not invalidate it, but irrevocably altered it. He shared the astonishing intellectual evidence of His return to life with a word of intimate familiarity and commanded her recognition with the gentlest string of sounds her hurting heart could hear: her own name. Our Lord knows us. We, and our ignorant and broken human hearts are no mystery to Him. He's calling us by name, as His sheep, so we can put down our hurt, recognize Him, and come away joyful. He wants to know why we are crying. But He already knows. When we share our pain with Him, he lifts us.

2. Thomas had the same moment of doubt that all the disciples did. Three days, reckoned in the Jewish way, of uncertainty that was not shattered until the evidence came in. Peter and John went to the tomb on the same doubt--the word that Jesus was no longer there was troubling enough to go from a walk to a run, but they couldn't just take the women's word for it, and didn't yet know what the empty tomb meant. there was a week-end stretch in which the only rational conclusion even the most faithful could draw from the events was, "well, I guess that's over now. Now what do we do?" We saddle Thomas with a uniquely bad rap because he wanted more than just the testimony of others, he wanted his own testimony. We define him by his worst act, forever dubbing him "doubting Thomas" for the same wish we all have--to know for ourselves better than others can tell us, to want to verify what we've trusted in. And how did the Lord treat his desire to see with his own eyes? He indulged it. He even magnified it--inviting Thomas to handle his wounds--the stigmata that He chose to keep despite an otherwise incorruptible and immortal form so that He could remember continually what He had done for us, and so that we would instantly recognize Him. He blessed Thomas for believing, and choosing to act on his beliefs--he transformed the belief to knowledge in some respects, and left Thomas with incentive to discover the fruits of his faith in others. The Lord's pattern of drawing us in to greater and greater levels of witness is the pattern He wants for us all. And while the faith of those who believe without needing evidence may have greater reward, there's no sign anywhere in scripture of the Lord being displeased with Thomas's faith. He rewards all those who seek Him. Let's not judge those seeking evidence. Let's provide them with it. And if you are one seeking evidence of God's grace, power, love, and truth, please accept my testimony: He lives, He loves you, He can save you, You must learn about Him and learn to obey Him, but it's worth it. Testimony is, in fact, one form of evidence. I'll be glad to help as you discover others.

Seven Good Words

 

There is scholarly debate about the order of the seven statements Christ made while on the cross, and about the accuracy of grouping the original seven (one is less confirmed between the synoptic Gospels), but I'll take the traditional grouping as it is traditionally presented and provide a comment for each.

1. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. (Luke 23:34)

Context is everything, but here, there's not enough. It's hard to tell whether the Lord was singling out the Roman soldiers carrying out the tortuous duties of the crucifixion without a clue as to the Jewish prophecies of a Messiah, or whether His intention was to broader addressees. What's clear, however, is that even as the victim of barbarous cruelties, this Lord is a merciful one. And that mercy extends to all of us. While it's true that more knowledge requires more responsibility, I doubt even the closest, most erudite, and most intimately familiar disciples of Jesus could comprehend the full significance of the crucifixion. The point is that all of us are in the same position of ignorance, compared to our Lord. He alone knew and passed below the sin and suffering of us all--felt the full eternal weight of our wrongs, and their consequences upon others--and He still offers us advocacy with the Father.

2. To day shalt thou be with me in paradise (Luke 23:43)

 Unless you believe that Christ was a liar, this verse should be sufficient to altar the common Christian misconception that the scriptural term Paradise is synonymous with the concept of Heaven. Three days after this statement, Christ returned--a glorified and resurrected Being--but made sure to include the detail that He had not yet ascended to His Father. Paradise is therefore not where God resides, but is, instead a waiting space for eternal spirits to await their resurrection. Those awaiting a felicitous judgment have a preview of the peace and joy that will be eternally theirs after judgment day, and that is where the spirit of the repentant thief to whom Christ was individually speaking joined his Lord's spirit. But it takes no belief in Joseph Smith, or the Book of Mormon to deduce that the broader Christian world's simplistic conception of Paradise as a place of instant final judgment at the time of death is not entirely accurate. And it speaks to the Lord's persistence in acting for the benefit of others--extending mercy--even while under extreme duress. He can change our state just as instantly: from sinful to enlightened.

3. Woman, behold thy son...behold thy mother (John 19:26-27)

 In what is commonly seen as a passing on of familial responsibilities at the point of death, Jesus gestured to his disciple John, and let his mother know that he would be looking after her from this point forward. Her need, seeing her divine, and yet also biological Son suffering on the cross, was great at the time. From the moment the angel Gabriel informed her of the pregnancy she was blessed to carry out, Mary had pondered in her heart the meaning of her Son and His mission. But while the intellect can comprehend a concept, a parent is never more pained as when watching their beloved child suffering. Jesus was in the middle of an infinite atonement, the pain of which all language is inadequate to describe, and yet He wanted to comfort his mother in the immediacy of her need. He sees our need as well, and comforts us in our affliction.

4. I thirst (John 19:28)

Far from the control leak that this expression of physical discomfort seems to betray on the surface, John takes great pains to show us the context of this utterance. It wasn't an indulgence of the body, but instead an intentional trigger for the soldiers there to fulfill prophecy that He knew, but they didn't. Not to indulge the vulgarity of the Romans' brutality too much, but the sponge they filled with vinegar likely came from their field kits--the equivalent of our modern-day toilet paper. And by predicting that level of cruelty as a response when he shared his physical state and implied that they should supply Him at least the most basic dignity of water, He who had gone without water for 40 days on prior occasions, had maneuvered them into compliance with a thousand year old Psalm (69:21). The sign of vinegar given for drink to the Messiah could have supplied anyone in attendance who had sung it (and there were many who must have) with more evidence of His divinity, and their need for His living water.

5. Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani! (Matt 27:46)

Even stronger than the last reference to a Psalm while on the cross, was Jesus's choice to cry out not in Hebrew, not in Latin, not in Greek, but in Aramaic, the lingua franca of the majority of the people present was a teachable moment connecting worshipers to evidence of His role as Messiah. As His crucifixion robbed his body of vital fluids and left Him with an unquenchable thirst, so His heart was strained with the necessity of carrying parts of His atoning burden alone. "I thirst" had a deeper significance in its connection to a Psalm, but did express on the surface exactly what He was feeling. In the same way, the interpretation Matthew shares after transliterating the Aramaic for his readership conveys faithfully the most human moment our Lord ever endured--He who so alone merited the constant companionship of His Father and His Spirit was left unjustly abandoned so the atoning work could be complete. Knowing how exquisite that solitude felt, His pledge is to never leave us alone. But, again, on another level, the choice to use Aramaic was also significant. Jews of all kinds, with training in the ancient Hebrew of the scriptures, or commoners whose familiarity was only with the translated version--the Targum--could not have failed to recognize the first line of Psalm 22 in the same way no modern person familiar with Christmas carols could fail to complete the line with the words "let earth receive her king!" when the words "Joy to the world, the Lord is come" are uttered. And what are the contents of Psalm 22? That Messianic psalm refers to a casting of lots for raiment that had just happened, mocking words which had just happened, and a piercing of hands and feet which had just happened. Perhaps even to the very Pharisees who had called for His torture and death at the hands of Pilate's legions were being given one last chance to recognize Him for who He really was--the fulfillment of prophecy, the Messiah who atoned for sin--and to let that recognition turn them to repentance. Here again, surface and second-level contexts validate both His ability to understand us, and to save us from sin and eternal suffering.

6. Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit (Luke 23:46)

 Using all but three of His last words in prayer, Jesus modeled to the end a pattern of obedience despite hardship and a submission to His Father who acts only ever out of love for His children. He was submissive to no Roman or earthly authority. He demonstrated submission not even to His own body, heart, and mind's needs, appetites, and compulsions. He didn't even choose to use the power of His own divinity for His own relief, and instead, to the dregs, drank the cup the Father required of Him, commending to the Father not only His spirit, but the glory of a plan fulfilled, of salvation made available to all. How much more need have we, then, of accepting the Father's will that we leave behind the sins and suffering that burdens us and cast it upon our great Redeemer. He paid the price so we wouldn't have to.

7. It is finished (John 19:30)

I don't think any human can fully imagine the sense Jesus must have become aware of as His Atoning sacrifice was drawing to a close that there was a chronological point of termination impending that sparked this utterance. Whatever triggered his perception of the end, He could have kept it to Himself, but instead chose to share so we could know what the example was. Like all of the previous utterances, the vocalizations were not for His own benefit, but ours. What we should keep in mind that the term "finished" was recorded in the Greek of the New Testament with the same word we now use to indicate flawlessness, but which at the time meant completion: perfect. As His model implies, we too must endure to the end, complete the work the Father gives us, and hold fast to the iron rod of scripture. He was all-in, committed to the end, and fulfilled His purpose of becoming--becoming the atoning Lamb of God--and we must make that sacrifice meaningful in our own lives by emulating His all-in-ness with Him. He commanded the listeners to His Sermon on the Mount to be perfect (there's that word again!) even as His Father was perfect. He commanded the Nephites, Lamanites, and Mulekites in attendance at the temple at Bountiful when He re-delivered that Sermon to be perfect even as He and His Father were perfect. Partnering with Him is what completes us. Giving Him our sin, is what covers our flaws, and gives us new life. Walking with Him--whose mission was not complete even if His atoning sacrifice was--means we must endure life's challenges, but with Him taking our failures upon Him, our walk of faith assures our own blessing and the blessing of all who hear our testimony, in whatever manner we share it.

Easter time means reverent reflection, for me. I hope thinking about what He said on the cross is helpful in your own effort to emulate Him.

Last Supper, New Covenant, Beloved Friends

 

Whatever else one can comment about Da Vinci's high renaissance aesthetic choices, the title of his famous painting, the Last Supper is an utter misnomer. It was neither a supper, nor the last meal Jesus ate with His apostles. Of course, the title has a certain accuracy of intention--Jesus and his disciples did, in fact, eat an evening meal and it was, in fact, the last recorded ingestion of nourishment our mortal Lord took in before the vinegar sponge on the cross and then His death. Instead, what I'm pointing to is that calling it a mere "last" supper drains all of the significance of the event. The meal was so much more than a social gathering with food and its function did mark the end of something, but only to inaugurate something new.

First, while not precisely the modern version, this began as what the Jewish apostles in attendance thought of as a seder--a Passover meal full of symbolism and covenant renewal. Since the time of Moses, the Hebrews were commanded to hold their covenantal identity as their highest, to integrate cyclically repeated religious rituals as markers of national togetherness under a God of liberation. This "meal" was a highly metaphorical performance in which music, scripture, and specially prepared tokens were literally incorporated--put into the body--to become physically one with the covenant individuals, all in unity. It faced both backwards and forwards chronologically, reminding the Jews of the miracle of the Exodus by which they emerged from slavery as a nation and as a covenant people and pointing them forward to the final miraculous liberation from the slavery of sinful conditions at the last day.

Secondly, while this was the performance of a longstanding religious event, and was the "last" Passover prescribed by Elohim, its function was less about an ending than a beginning. It was also the initiation of an alteration of the ritual and a reframing of its significance. It was training for the disciples in the new procedures of the sacrament. Thinking of it that way makes the social conclusions Da Vinci wants your eyes to draw from his busy and lengthy table, with side-conversation and even disorder, seem less apt. But even the food elements must be reconceived. Rather than focusing on the meat of a blemish-free and innocent animal slain, whose blood was symbolically painted on the doorframes of the obedient as a mark for the destroying angel to pass by, Jesus focused on the wine as the symbol of His atoning blood. Rather than focusing on the urgency with which the nation of Israel had to prepare its meal in the symbol of the unleavened bread, Jesus focused on the brokenness of the pieces to signify his freely offered mortal flesh.

Finally, the covenant the Lord made with Moses and the Hebrews was that He would redeem them. The seder symbols were all directed toward the hope this redemption brought. But, as is often the temptation, many thought of fidelity to tradition as the purpose, rather than covenant renewal. Their myopic insistence on the rearview mirror prevented these from preparing their hearts through repentance, from enjoying the windshield full of purpose-filled vistas of the eternal destination that a redemptive prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane and a redemptive sacrifice on the cross were driving them toward. The apostles, enthralled by both conversation and the spirit of the ritual were learning something new, however--that taking the emblems of Christ's sacrifice (which they hadn't yet witnessed, and therefore could only retroactively make sense of) made the group one, and made each individual one with Christ in a commandment-keeping, name-taking, always representing way. They performed to themselves and to the all-seeing God they worshiped that they were willing--willing to take upon them His name, to keep His commandments, and to always remember Him with the kind of active remembrance that imbues all of their actions with His imprint.

And let's also keep in mind the nature of the new commandment itself. He laid out for them, alongside His promise to send the Comforter as a constant companion in fulfillment of the covenant relationship that they submitted their will to take upon themselves that they must love even as He loves.

In describing that love, the King James Version, among many others, makes a curious choice of translation from the Greek. A god can perhaps have a greater love, but "greater love hath no man that this," the Savior who was about to do just that said to those gathered, "that a man lay his life for his friends" (John 15:13). He immediately qualified the term defining the receivers of the benefit of that life laid down in the next verse, with the phrase "Ye are my friends if you do whatsoever I command you," and then gave the commandment to love "one another" (John 15:17). In each of the iterations of the word "friends," the translators had an alternative for the Greek philon: beloved.

I don't know about you, but for me, a friendship can range from a minor acquaintance to an intimate partnership. It has to go beyond business, and it doesn't rise to family, except maybe metaphorically. It can mean something banal, and yet something good but not ultimately important, something fulfilling when close and yet can have distance and lower gradations. It seems less apt to me than beloved.

 Beloved, on the other hand, can't exist without the word love. It's filled with choice and affection, and communicates clearly the radiance of the heart. Friends are not always loved ones, but loved ones are always family. We are children, metaphorical sheep, who the Father and Shepherd protect, gather, and feed in safe pastures. The relationship between the Savior and those He redeems is not mere camaraderie, but utterly intimate knowledge and embrace--it is one of knowing our sin, uniquely feeling the full weight of its eternal consequences, and taking us into the outstretched arm of His love, which is His power, despite it.

And we are His beloved when we do what He says not out of some blind or perverse pleasure He takes from control, but rather out of the joy of discovering, as a parent does a child, that learning to behave as He does, learning self-control as He exudes, unlocks our own joys and liberties. Conformity is not the goal of the Creator, but oneness in Him sparks the only true diversity: eternal progression.

May each sacrament meeting fill you with His love, because you've prepared for it through repentance, and expand your hope and faithful walk, approaching, in as great an increment as our mortal limits allow, His life more abundant. May every teacher's preparation, priest's blessing, and deacon's passing of the sacred aspects of His remembrance--the symbolic bread and water--evacuate your sin, and prepare you for the indwelling of the Spirit. May Easter week's new covenant make you one with Him, beloved, and ready to love one another.

Palm Sunday and the Plan of Salvation

 

Who is this Jesus of which all the world speaks? At the time of His mortal ministry a great variety of opinions prevailed at one time or another. At the moment of Palm Sunday, however, popular opinion aligned in the positive column. Authorities chafed, but the people believed he was at the very least a great rabbi, healer, worker of miracles, and perhaps even a Messiah. Whether they were believers in His divinity or not, whether they thought of Him as a Savior from Roman political and military oppression, or whether He was, instead, to save from something more eternally consequential, they bestowed upon Him a triumphal Passover-week entry into the Temple city, with the traditional markers of Hebrew royalty: the colt of a donkey, the palm leaves, and the shouts of Hosanna. This fulfilled prophecy in scripture.

Before the week ended, this Figure of intense popularity would suffer an ignominious death on the cross, His followers in hiding, and with nearly all popular support entirely evaporated. He trod the winepress alone. He didn't fulfill their expectation of the role of the Messiah. The bulk of the people had misinterpreted the words, the works, and even the Being of the Great I Am.

He was the heir to the throne of David by two separate reckonings of His earthly lineage. But the people's use of palm branches as symbolic of His kingship mostly mistook his purpose as earthly. Instead, He gave us new symbols of an eternal victory engraved on the anatomical site from which the tree etymologically draws its name: His palms. The cares of this mortal world influence us, increase or decrease our liberty, or our suffering. But He didn't come to defeat Caesar, but rather sin, a far more lasting source of misery and slavery.

Which palms deserve our worshipful meditation on a Palm Sunday like today? I choose the latter.

But in doing so today, my mind felt moved toward another similar symbolic mistaking. Just as the Jews at Jerusalem used the perfect imagery while missing the deeper point, I wonder if we sometimes, as members of His Church, don't miss the deeper point when we speak of the Plan of Salvation.

Ask anyone over the age of 8 what the Plan of Salvation is, and they're likely to ask for a piece of paper so they can draw it for you. It's become such an instant codeword that we feel satisfied laying it out as if it's self explanatory, or at least it gives us some visual aids with which to sketch out God's broad cosmic chronology and discuss His purposes for His children as they traverse its various spheres and barriers. It's often schematically laid out below.

None of the schema is wrong. None of the doctrine attached to it is incorrect. Humans are the literal offspring of Elohim, eternal spirits who existed before birth, but who could not obtain our divine inheritance without a mortal testing period. The earth really was created as the space for our mortality, and after death, we do await resurrection and judgment in a Spirit World for our assignment to whatever degree of glory the Supreme Justice renders to us based on our acts and repentance in this mortal realm. There's nothing mistaken in using the visual tools to describe any of these true points of doctrine, and they correctly schematize an arc of progression that God has planned for all of His children.

But a map isn't a plan. A plan has steps. A plan breaks an objective down into decisions. A plan details the tasks and resources required to achieve an intention through agency. The above schema is handy as the architecture of the Plan of Salvation, but it is not, properly speaking, a plan of salvation.

The soteriological steps in God's economy are more essential and simpler than the map. God's Plan of Salvation is to receive the loving Atonement of the Redeemer by covenant. The plan is to learn of Jesus, act in faith on His name, repent, be baptized, and receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. God's plan to save us, is to judge us for our actions in mortality, but first to give us His Son as an infinite covering for the physical and spiritual death we all deserve, and to give us the free will to choose Him as our Advocate rather than suffer our own just desserts. His Plan of Happiness is Christ.

Let's keep his palms in view of our eyes of faith this Easter and throughout the year.

Nephi, Sheaves, and Filling Mouths - D&C 33:8-10

 

"Open your mouths and they shall be filled, and you shall become even as Nephi of old, who journeyed from Jerusalem in the wilderness. Yea, open your mouths and spare not, and you shall be laden with sheaves upon your backs, for lo, I am with you. Yea, open your mouths and they shall be filled, saying: Repent, repent, and prepare ye the way of the Lord, and make his paths straight; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand"

At the time of this revelation, the Church has been restored for under six months, and the first and second General Conferences are barely complete when the mission calls and training begins. There is fierce opposition early, with some small mob intimidation tactics interrupting baptisms, threatening tar and feathering, and even arrests that the courts release for lack of credible evidence on the trumped up charges of disorderly conduct.

And yet, despite local opponents, there is growth as well. And there is fervor to go out and share the message. In four separate sections, the Lord's missionary training program seems to center around one core, repeated commandment to individuals: "open your mouth."

To Oliver Cowdery, the Lord promises unparalleled strength if he will "open his mouth and declare my gospel as with the voice of a trump, both day and night" (24:12) and do it "with the sound of rejoicing"(28:16). To Peter Whitmer, brother in law to Cowdery, witness to the Gold Plates, and longtime family friend, the great Head of the Church promised "power" to build up the church among the Lamanites (which they assumed Native Americans were by ancestry) alongside his brother by obeying the command to "open [his] mouth to declare my gospel" (30:5). The theme of the open mouth gets its last mention in scripture for about another year here in Section 33, resurfacing next in Section 60. This time, however, the command shifts the locus of control in one important way--rather than the agents of filling it being the missionary, this time the Lord repeats a passive voice twice, leaving the connotation that the Lord Himself will be the agent of filling it.

The lesson is useful, and was repeated often in training sessions all throughout my own mission experience--you supply the willingness, and the faith to initiate the speech acts, and the Spirit does the work of making the words and the persuasion flow. This is also a pattern extendable by metaphor to all acts of faith--you start, and let God finish. He's the one that does the work. This doctrine is both liberating (I don't have to stress about the "how" and feel pre-consoled in the face of my own clumsiness or their rejection, because it's not me responsible) and motivating (I have to supply the effort and willingness). As I type, I feel to contact my ministering families just knowing how that's the step that demonstrates my faith so that they can have whatever blessing the Lord has conditioned it on.

But there are also two references in this particular use of the phrase "open your mouth" that deserve comment:

1. The sheaves, piled in a poke in the above image, might not seem an obvious metaphor to those of us unfamiliar with pre-modern grain farming techniques. I don't like the thought of being more burdened than I am, or having heavy things laden upon my back. But this is harvest imagery. If the grain represents the souls gathered in for care and storage, providing the winter's sustaining provisions, then sheaves are about the biggest bundle of converts individuals can support on their own. The image is not one by one ministering, but success in connecting souls with Christ through covenant by the armload. The bundles of stalks are organized for transport, and are therefore signs of completion of purpose, and the feeling a harvester has carrying one to the poke is not one of burden, but of satisfaction at a job well done, and at the prospect of prosperity each one brings.

2. Nephi seems an odd example for a missionary. His mission efforts--Gospel teaching efforts, broadly conceived--within his own traveling community ended up largely rejected by his most specific targets. While he was a stalwart on his own, and did bring Zoram, Sam, and his own progeny to truth and peace, his mouth opened in fiery sermons and grievance for his brothers' recalcitrance and wickedness in great power, but not with the result of persuasion. Laman and Lemuel, and the Ishmaelite family they influenced, fell into forbidden paths and sought to take the life of Nephi on multiple occasions. Being "as Nephi of old" isn't an apt motivating image for a missionary commanded to open his mouth unless you narrow the scope of Nephi's example to the immediate moments he was constrained by the Spirit to speak great words of truth--the kind the wicked take to be hard--and calling for repentance, for faithful action, for trying again, even when the first time and the second time don't work, and finally being "led by the Spirit." Nephi's faith kept his family together and advancing in Gospel unity in ways that prevented immediate crumbling, and that allowed for the robust faith and growth of future generations. Even Laman and Lemuel repented from time to time, learned about the nature of God by listening to their brother, and contributed to family and community success through much of their lengthy and arduous voyage. Nephi was a success when he did his best, trusting the Lord would not give a commandment that he couldn't accomplish, and letting God guide him.

Honor, Spirit, Word, and Power - D&C 29:36

 

"the devil...rebelled against me, saying, Give me thine honor, which is my power"

Did you ever have a teacher, a coach, a parent, or some other kind of leader that you admired? What made them admirable? Did they impress you with some act of wisdom or example or self-sacrifice? Their sphere of influence seemed to work well, despite challenges and differences, didn't it? What was it that made their class so inspiring, their team so effective and cohesive, their family so loving, their influence so beneficial? I'm sure some of their own individual traits were contagious and some of their ways of influencing were memorable. I'm sure they set high expectations, and their wards achieved great things because they rose to the standard.

But I would submit that some of the honor you hold for them is reciprocal. They trusted you to do the right thing, and supported you as you reached for it. In other words, your efforts--likely combined with the efforts of others--in a good, maybe even unified direction produced the good outcome that is then imputed to the leader. Good teachers hold students accountable for their own learning.  Good coaches organize drives for personal achievement, which helps the team. Good parents produce loving and well-adjusted children who become responsible adults because they model love, responsibility, and self-sacrifice, and they find joy in the journey of it all. Good leaders enable productivity, peace, stability, and prosperity in others. It's because you honored their leadership that you and others grew and it redounded to the honor of all.

The famous Robin Williams movie, Dead Poet's Society, demonstrates how students who are previously kept in line by fear and by excessive use of authority learn to love a subject they previously hated, learn to love the teacher who opened their eyes to freedom of expression, and then who could never further be repressed. Don't get me wrong, there are examples of misuse of freedom and loss of freedom in that movie's plot, but the relationship of love for an honored teacher brings students to take a courageous stand in the face of fearful authority, and to demonstrate the power of a true teacher. "O captain, my captain!" the intrepid students exclaimed as they stood on their desks in protest of the unjust firing of their beloved pedagogue.

Now extend this principle to a Being of utter perfection, limitless intelligence, and absolute purity of both love and justice. Can you begin to imagine, now, how the principle of honor becomes a principle of power? Can you begin to imagine how whatever sphere of intelligence prevails must bend and acquiesce when the will of He whose love and justice is absolute expresses it? How His Word, which is the power of His Spirit, is obeyed without compulsion because of the respect Creation owes to its perfect Creator? Because of how all that can act knows that He who acts absolutely deserves alignment to Him? Can you see how working with His Spirit brings power to both Him and you, when you partner with Him for the blessing of others? How honor is connected to true, cooperative power?

And can you also see the crime of Lucifer: pridefully commanding God to bestow unearned honor upon him; seeking his Father's power; seeking to use it to compel obedience? Satan was cast out--this was a literal death sentence, when you understand how removal from the Spirit (read: honor, power, love) is defined as spiritual death from the surrounding verses in this Section. But it should be more meaningful now why that needed to be the punishment: Lucifer's "plan" makes no sense, doesn't work because it can't, and distorts everything about mercy, love, justice, and eternal progression. It's impossible to steal honor (read: power, Spirit, Word), to try is to betray the very principle of it.

Because Christ atoned for our sins, He became the Word He always was--the One worthy of honor, power, and glory; the embodiment of love who can cover our sins and justify the guilty, even exalt the worthy. His is the only name given under heaven whereby we can be saved. Not even Elohim can. Because to excuse us without repentance and covenantal oneness with the Son would shake all creation, betraying His own honor, and He would cease to be God. Christ, our only Advocate with the Father, completed that infinite atonement that allows Him to declare that justice has been fully paid, glory be to the Father, and yet mercy claims those on His right hand.

My pondering on this topic began in my youth with a famous talk by the late, great BYU religion professor Cleon Skousen. His talk, then on tape, is not official church doctrine, but provides a compelling testimony-boosting narrative that helped me put scriptural pieces together along these lines in ways that have sustained my faith throughout challenges and even my periods of separation from God. I encourage all to spend the hour and 20 minutes with him--it's well worth the time.

The Spirit and Spiritual Laws

 

"Verily I say unto you that all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal; neither any man, nor the children of men; neither Adam, your father, whom I created. Behold, I gave unto him that he should be an agent unto himself; and I gave unto him commandment, but no temporal commandment gave I unto him, for my commandments are spiritual; they are not natural nor temporal, neither carnal nor sensual."

1. You can eat anything here, except that. Don't eat that. 

Does that sound like a spiritual law to you? From the outside, it appears arbitrary, actually. With no other context, it's possible to see the command as a flex. It's disconnected from any clear benefit. It could be merely an ego-stroking exercise of control.

When you understand it's a loving father speaking to his son, the context forces a new interpretation. Now the rule is an expression of love and higher wisdom. The child doesn't know himself yet, and can't tell the consequences of his actions. He has no way to predict the outcomes, and it could be dangerous for him to put some things in his mouth, so the father communicates the guiderails that will ensure that the alimentary needs get met under conditions of safety. The father prevents needless suffering by communicating healthy boundaries to behavior.

But is that a spiritual commandment yet? Certainly all expressions of love and sharing of care and intelligence have spiritual causes and effects. But unless you're willing to entertain a deeper level of context to inform a deeper level of analysis, you might miss that this isn't just about avoiding suffering and isn't just about the safety of the body. It's about teaching us that natural appetites must be subject to higher purposes and that moral agents must proactively choose the right (sometimes otherwise neutral choices like what to eat rise to the level of a question of morality, if the ingested substance is morally dangerous). It teaches us who we can trust, listen to, obey, and grow in understanding toward.

A commandment from a loving God about what not to eat is no mere health code, and is no mere safety regulation--it's a design element in His plan to teach our spirits to properly act through the bodies we are given and on the other matter surrounding us. It's a principle of faith, power, enlightenment, peace, and joy. It enables a widening circle of ability to act, and brings us closer to the Source of all righteousness.

The concept that all commandments are spiritual should expand our conception of all of the 10 commandments, maybe the last 6 most expressly. The spiritual context for understanding the Word of Wisdom, the laws of sacrifice, obedience, and even chastity can be circumscribed into one great whole: that "fear" (although the Hebrew word translators deployed as "fear" here, is really more like humility, awe and reverence, and not terror or dread--it's awareness of God's goodness, and our smallness in comparison) of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom, faith, power, and honor. God's laws teach us His nature, and through obedience, we approach both it and Him, we align with the principles that frame His nature and "know Him" in the way the great intercessory prayer calling for the oneness of the believers with the Father and the Son expresses: "this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent."

God doesn't demand honor and obedience because He's petty and enjoys controlling us. He is pleased when we are humble before Him, but His commandments aren't for His benefit. He doesn't demand honor and obedience merely because they benefit us in mortality. Societies that do implement His prescriptions live freer, more prosperously, and more stably than others, and minimize harm. But they aren't primarily self-help recommendations or social harmony suggestions. God demands honor and obedience because eternal individual and social conditions depend on implementing and growing through the principles He Himself is eternally bound by. Taking seriously the idea that we really are His children and heirs means we are under obligation to prepare to shoulder the awesome creative power of His Word and His spirit in some far-off eternity, accepting competently whatever eternal crowns or responsibility He has in store for us. We have to learn to live like Father. And understanding how His spirit made the physical world means understanding that the physical laws He prescribes are also spiritual in nature. As we learn to act as He acts, with spiritual purpose through material means, we simultaneously learn to act and not be acted upon, as He--the Prime Mover--acts and is not acted upon.

2. As all master pedagogues do, the Lord teaches Smith and the others to whom this Section is addressed what His key terms are, sometimes by opposition. He has built up an argument to blow their minds: that commandments are spiritual, not temporal. But the binary between spirit and time is not sufficiently clear by itself to give the proper contours of the concept. It is immediately suggestive that the opposite of temporal--meaning time-bound, or understood by chronological means--would logically be something like eternal, endless, or achronological, and that therefore putting spiritual opposite temporal equates the spiritual with the eternal.

But the Lord also provides three other opposites for our triangulation of how he understands the term "spiritual." Spiritual is not only non-temporal, it is also the opposite of natural (or not bound by what we can understand as the cause-and-effect world of the material that we understand by the sciences), of carnal (or not limited to the appetites, needs, and decays of biological flesh), and of sensual (or not apprehended by what inputs our mortal minds can process, or what appeals to our senses). We have to conceptualize the spiritual not only as that which lasts into the eternities (and is therefore of most value), but as that which transcends our senses, our bodies, and our mortal conditions. We have to think of the spiritual as not subject to what understanding of our bodies, senses and mortal conditions we can derive from senses, from matter, and from human rational thought. Our spirits are supernatural, disembodied, and eternal, and cannot be comprehended without new eyes, new tools beyond our abilities.

The fact that mortality consists of a pairing of these agential forces of spirit with physical bodies, bound in time, flesh, and nature, and bound by senses as they are, is not only a miraculous wonder in and of itself, but a huge impetus to get our preparation time right. Now is the time to prepare to meet God--He too is an embodied spirit, but glorified through obedience to eternal principles of joy, peace, love, and justice.

The Power of the Word - D&C 29:30-33

"Remember that all my judgments are not given unto men; and as the words have gone forth out of my mouth even so shall they be fulfilled, that the first shall be last, and that the last shall be first in all things whatsoever I have created by the word of my power, which is the power of my Spirit. For by the power of my Spirit created I them; yea, all things both spiritual and temporal—First spiritual, secondly temporal, which is the beginning of my work; and again, first temporal, and secondly spiritual, which is the last of my work—Speaking unto you that you may naturally understand; but unto myself my works have no end, neither beginning; but it is given unto you that ye may understand, because ye have asked it of me and are agreed."

A small group of elders and members, preparing for the first General Conference (we're coming up on another one to which you're all invited) had questions about specifics of their Book of Mormon study and how they connected with Biblical doctrine. They brought their questions to Joseph Smith, uniting to hear if the Lord would provide interpretive guidance or reveal new doctrine as He had on several occasions recently. The questions were about two topics specifically: the whereabouts of the New Jerusalem, which passages from 3 Nephi and Ether indicated would be somewhere in the Americas; and on Adam's fall, which they had various opinions about.

As was the case when Smith himself went to a grove as a boy to ask which church to join, the effusive response to these questions went much further than their questions naturally implied. In the course of helping the faithful foresee where, why, and how to gather the elect--including the urgency of the task--and helping them understand the doctrinal context of the chronological steps of the Plan of Salvation, which was not yet explicitly established as such, the Lord used evocative language that deserves a close look:

1. John the Beloved opens his Gospel with quasi-mystical poetic language to describe Christ in ways no other book of scripture does. The association of God with the Logos--a polysemic Greek term of impossible complexity often translated as "word", but just as easily capturing the concepts of "logic", "reason", "principle", or "order"--has inspired lengthy treatises on the nature of God as "first cause" and "prime mover" of creation, as underlying principle of all reality, and as connection between word and thing, signifier and signified. Monotheists who believe in an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent Father full of love and mercy can agree that there may be something quite literal for a Being so powerfully beyond our understanding to speak and for creation to simply align in obedience like magic. LDS doctrine, emboldened by the demonstration to Joseph Smith that the trinitarian notion of a god of "no body parts or passions" was a misinterpretation, retains all the awe and reverence for that Father, while avoiding the irrational superstition that makes the Being who communicates His nature to us through the familial term "Heavenly Father" into something unrelatable and distant. We understand that Jehovah was a spirit before His embodiment as the child of Mary, and that He is a spirit still, although eternally ensconced in glorified and immortal flesh as He has promised we all will be after the resurrection. His bodily form and the mastery of His spirit over it is the essence of our earthly model, and His power over death is also the sign of His power over sin, or spiritual death. Because we know the Godhead has three separate Beings, rather than believing in a three-in-one Trinity, we can take it more literally when Jehovah reveals that even before His spirit had flesh, He had power--that His organizing, comprehending Logos could create by mere commandment. We can connect the concept of spirit as intelligence--as active matter that can act on passive matter--to the concept of faith. In every act we take, we must first think it in our minds, decide to carry it out, and then move. Christ's power to act is something we too can imagine--our will, though subject to natural forces His has already mastered, follows the same model and principles every step of faith it takes toward becoming like Him: God made plans, and then fleshed them out. May our faith lead our will to be ever more subject to Him, finding in Him power over flesh and all other temporal matters.

If the above seems abstract and esoteric, please know that it's me trying to wrestle with concepts I can barely and only vaguely grasp, and give my best attempt at wrangling them into language. I'm not fully satisfied that I've laid out even what I intend to write here. But if it's not obvious by my content, it should be at least by my demonstration of ineffectiveness at communicating that the concept of the Word being the power of God's spirit is pretty mind-blowing, and deserves more pondering.

2. We can rightly call God our Father. He chose the term as His name and uses it to teach about His nature, as do all of the names and titles He has inspired prophets to teach us that He goes by. Another is "the Alpha and the Omega." Literally the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, the metaphor seems clear: He is the beginning and ending. He was present at Creation, and will be present at Judgment Day. But He's also an "eternal" Being. As a being locked in a finite chronological system with an irrevocable arrow of time, it boggles my mind to contemplate how a Being who can see the end before the beginning, and who knows each cause before its effect has triggered it, must have to dumb His message way down. If past, present, and future are all present to His eyes and mind, there's no reason to think in the terms we find inevitable--past, start, seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, end, sequence, increments, becoming, last, first. All of it is only for the benefit of us, mortal beings temporarily trapped in temporality. How merciful He is, then, to condescend to help us grasp His project with phrases like the last shall be first and the first shall be last. Smith's intermediary effect allows us to understand how the Day of Judgment will mirror the Creation, reversing a spirit-first, temporal-last process into a resurrection of bodies before an assignment of eternal glories to those bodies according to eternally fixed criteria. As futile as it seems, trying to wrap one's brain around eternal things leads to gratitude both for the magnitude of creation (and the work of its salvation) and for the love in the Creator who speaks to us in terms we can understand about His nature.

Shame and the Good Shepherd - D&C 29:27

 

"And the righteous shall be gathered on my right hand unto eternal life; and the wicked on my left hand will I be ashamed to own before the Father"

A short comment or two on a small detail in a familiar doctrine can hit different. This section contains soaring language as Joseph Smith takes on the Messianic voice to frame prophecies about when the Savior will return in response to a handful of faithful elders of the Church unified in prayer and common inquiry on the subject in preparation for the first General Conference (September 1830). The great work of gathering scattered Israel, creating a Zion society on the earth for heaven to bless, and preparing the way for the Lord's promised return was on their minds and hearts, as was their own roles in this work, and the Lord laid out specifics for them in response.

In this particular passage, the Lord is transitioning between those details of his return, and the first scriptural laying out of the doctrinal skeleton of what we now commonly call the Plan of Salvation. (I maintain that we should be careful what we put under that label, because the plan of how humans are saved is not the same as the map of its main structures, but I digress.) So here, before the insightful doctrinal commentary begins, the Savior relays the endpoints: heaven and hell, those who will be on His right hand or His left hand at judgment day.

Did you notice the phrase "ashamed to own before the Father?" Paul wrote to the Romans that he wasn't ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, and so they shouldn't be either. Peter, whose repentance from having been ashamed of Christ himself three times on a certain fateful night was then complete, invited the church as a whole to not be ashamed of Christ, but rather to glory in His name despite potentially suffering because of conviction in Him. Jesus Himself taught His disciples that those who allow fear of human opinions to paralyze them from accepting the truth that He is the Redeemer, and from behaving accordingly would find, to their own horror on judgment day, that the turnabout will be worse for them.

The doctrine isn't new that Christ will be ashamed of those who are ashamed of Him. What hit different for me was the framing of that shame. In this passage, there was purpose and direction that the other scriptural mentions of shame don't connote. Judgment day consists of a gathering of those worthy to be called Christ's, and by their own acts of will, some will fall short of that worthiness at that time. But rather than the image of a vengeful god who dispenses righteous disgust at the willfully stiff necks whose arrogance makes reject the love of the All-powerful and All-merciful, this hints at a desire to save more, but not being able to. He has to present a group to the Father that meet a certain criteria. He needs to be proud of having covered them with His atoning and cleansing blood because of their acceptance of that infinite gift. Those belong to Him. They are called by His name and know His voice and follow Him. But there are some who simply will not accept Him. He loves them too! He wishes they would just hear Him, but they won't. And He is bound by His own eternal word, by the judgement of His Father, and by the eternal principles of justice and mercy, and therefore His own power is limited by their will.

Another way to put this might be in terms of comfort. When I'm the least well dressed at a formal affair, I can expect a certain level of discomfort. It's an imperfect analogy, of course, especially since some have more aptitude than others at even feeling righteous social opprobrium, but imagine that scenario dialed up to infinite. At the moment of your meeting that Being of infinite goodness and love, having a "bright recollection of your guilt," as Alma put it, your sensitivity and your separation from Him and His nature will be at a matching and infinite maximum contrast unless you aren't going it alone--unless the Lamb of God has embraced you as His. And His discomfort too would kick for all who have un-repented wickedness remaining. As advocate, he simply can't present you dressed in that at the gates of eternal joy at His Father's kingdom of perfect love, perfect justice, and perfect progression. Without accepting Him, your own conscience would shrivel you, knowing you don't belong--not because the "club" is that exclusive, but because your nature is that criminal.

He wants to "own" us all. His burden is light. His requirements are accessible. He requires all of us, but His grace is sufficient all along the way.