By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness. You shall not defraud. Honor your father and mother.’ ” He said to him, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.” Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions. (Mark 10:17-22)

Mark presents him only as a man with many possessions. Matthew calls him a “young man,” and Luke describes him as a “ruler” who was “very rich.” The version that has come down to us through history is “the rich young ruler,” a composite taken from all three versions of the story. This amalgamation has not served it us well, as it gives us too many ways to resist identifying the man as ourselves. I am not young, and I am not a ruler. I can even stretch the definition of “very rich” so far out of context that it might not necessarily always include me. Not my needle; not my camel.

Luke 15 contains three parables, stacked one on top of the other: one about a lost sheep, one about a lost coin, and one about a man and his two sons. I think, given their proximity in the text, it is reasonable to believe that the Gospel’s author intended them to be read together and to inform each’s interpretation of the other. I will admit to having never done this previously; and when I did I was surprised to discover how the parables work together to reinforce the importance of making individualized accounting for each sheep/coin/individual over whom we have charge.

Brigham Henry Roberts (1857-1933) was an LDS general authority (1888-1933). A well known church writer, historian, missionary, and political firebrand, Roberts wrote frequently for church publications, though his output on certain subjects had diminished over the last few decades of his life. He often published in the church’s Improvement Era magazine, alternately devoted to the young men of the church, the priesthood quorums, and then the combined young men and young women of the church, though it was read by older cohorts as well.

In June 1932, a recent Harvard graduate, Philip Wentworth, published an essay in The Atlantic, detailing his faith crisis and transition away from Christianity and his midwestern Presbyterian roots. The article was a fine piece of work, and its points were rather sharp. In this part, I’ll summarize Wentworth’s history and in the second part of the post (to be published sometime next week I think) I’ll look at Wentworth’s account of his descent into a rationalist mire. In part 3 (and possibly a 4th part), I’ll look at Roberts’s response in the Era after reading Wentworth’s piece.

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It seems that the richer Christians get, the more interpretive energy they put into proving that Jesus didn’t really mean what he said about rich people. The camel through the eye of the needle? That was just the back gate to Jerusalem. Sell all you have and give it to the poor? He was using hyperbole to prove a point. Mary’s Magnificat? Never heard of it. If I had a dollar for every time I have had these discussions in a church context, I would be rich enough to have to worry about it.

In my experience there is a deep respect for our Jewish brothers and sisters that permeates LDS culture. But it is also my experience that occasionally LDS members unknowingly fall into antisemitic patterns of language and perspective which have, unfortunately, been connected with Christianity since its earliest times. This year, the LDS church’s course of study has moved out of the Hebrew Bible and is approaching the halfway mark in its study of the New Testament. As we continue to engage the New Testament, it is exceptionally important that we are attentive to, studiously avoid, and actively resist any perpetuation of antisemitic scripts in our worship communities and during our Sunday School discussions.

April is National Poetry Month, and BCC Press has always been the place to go for great Mormon poetry. Since the founding of the press in 2017, we have led the way in publishing the freshest, most thought-provoking, and just all around best volumes of poetry to be found anywhere in the Mormon world. Or, really, anywhere else too.

Even by the high standards we have set, however, April 2023 is our high-water mark. Our only competition is ourselves, and we have blown ourselves out of the water as we today release three volumes of poetry by three of Mormondom’s most amazing poets. We still can’t believe how awesome we are.

This is what we’ve got for you:

Let’s begin, not in Galilee, but in River City, Iowa, the setting of Meredith Wilson’s classic musical, The Music Man, where Professor Harold Hill is trying to convince the Widow Paroo to buy a cornet and a fancy uniform for a band that, he knows, will never play a note. (see clip here)

HAROLD: Mrs. Paroo do you realize you have the facial characteristics of a cornet virtuoso?

MRS. PAROO: I don’t know if I understand you entirely, Professor.

HAROLD: If your boy has that same firm chin, and those splendid cheek muscles – By George! Not that he could ever be really great, you understand, but –

MRS. PAROO: Oh, is that so. And in the name of St. Bridget, why not?

HAROLD: Well – you see all the really great Cornet players were Irish – O’Clark, O’Mendez, O’Klein –

MRS. PAROO: But Professor, we are Irish!

HAROLD” No! No! Really! That clinches it! Sign here, Mrs. Paroo. Your boy was born to play the Cornet!

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I was taken aback in a recent re-reading of the Parable of the Good Samaritan by the way in which Jesus reframes a tricky question to deliver a stunning message.

Recall that the parable is prompted when a lawyer asks Jesus a series of very lawyerly questions (apologies to all my lawyer friends… but you know I’m right). The exchange goes like this:

The lawyer asks Jesus, “Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus responds, “What is written in the law? how readest thou?” The lawyer thinks for a moment and says, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.” Jesus says, approvingly, “Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.” And then the lawyer retorts, “And who is my neighbour?”

At this point Jesus tells the parable (Luke 10:30-35) which is ubiquitous enough that it does not need recounting here. And upon conclusion of the narrative, Jesus reengages the lawyer directly. Here is the exchange:

Jesus asks, “Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?” The lawyer responds (with the only right answer), “He that shewed mercy on him.” Then said Jesus, “Go, and do thou likewise.”

Here is what I find really remarkable: By asking the question, “who is my neighbor” the lawyer tries to get Jesus to categorize and classify others, so that the lawyer can then say, “that group is my neighbor, and that group is not.” Jesus does not take the bait.

Instead, in his response Jesus recasts the issue entirely. “Neighbor” is not a group outside of ourselves. Instead of categorizing others, Jesus responds by clarifying you are to be a neighbor. “Neighbor” is something we are to others. Thus neighborliness, Jesus seems to say, should be our polestar when we engage with our fellow brothers and sisters on Earth. Jesus reinforces this by the command “Go, and do thou likewise.”

Imagine what life would be like if, instead of asking “which one of these people is my neighbor and which isn’t?” everyone started asking “how can I be a neighbor to the people around me?” I think the Gospel of Jesus requires nothing less.

Yesterday, my five-year-old nephew was assigning characters from the Easter story to the rainbow of marbles in his marble run, and he chose the red marble (his favorite color) for Jesus. My sister commented on how his choice mirrored D&C 133:48 (and Revelation 19:13), which says Jesus will be wearing red at the Second Coming.

That got me thinking of colors that symbolize Jesus. Personally, I’d have picked the blue marble, for living water. What other colors would symbolize Jesus? (Please add more colors/references in the comments!)

To read the Gospels is to become obsessed with a vision. And the name of the vision is “the Kingdom of God,” or, sometimes, “the Kingdom of Heaven” or just “the Kingdom.” It is the most powerful vision in any of the standard works, where it occasionally also goes by the name of “Zion.” It is the focus of most of Christ’s parables and of the vast majority of His teaching and ministry. And it remains one of the most poorly understood concepts in the churches that use his name.

And here is the root of the misunderstanding: throughout his ministry, Jesus tried to describe what the Kingdom looked like—how people who understand the vision act towards each other and how they orient themselves toward God. We have taken that simple description and turned it into a prescriptive list of things that we have to do to earn a place in something called “heaven.” In the process, we have turned consequences into rewards and instructions on how to live into checks that can only be cashed after we die. For centuries, Christians have been trying to earn the very thing that the New Testament instructs us to build.

Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that moment. (Matthew 15:21-28 NRSV)

The most significant thing about this passage is not that Jesus compares a woman to a dog, as striking as that image may be. Nor is it the announcement that Jesus has been sent to the Children of Israel. Those are both misdirections that Matthew and Mark throw into the story, like good stage magicians, to occupy our attention while they prepare the stunning finale: this is a story in which Jesus Christ, the mortal Messiah and incarnation of the God of the world, gets into an argument with a Canaanite woman, loses the argument, and changes his mind.

Later Dad will tell me why he believes it is right for Ali to remain Muslim. He will invite me into his room and sit me on the edge of the bed, his computer across his lap, and read a line from his journal: 

Ali has an old faith and an old country and we have a new faith and new country. If we were to convert all of the Muslims, that would be the end of us. Their culture is too old, we would be the ones that were assimilated. We might not even know it but we would become Islam like Christianity became Rome. 

If you live in Utah, then you have no excuse: get yourself to Writ & Vision in Provo tonight at 6:00 for the launch of Josh Sabey’s new book, Ali: The Iraqi. If you don’t live in Utah, you may still be able to catch a flight, or start driving, or just move there. It will be worth it. This book is that good.

Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands before they eat.” He answered them, “And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? (Matthew 15:1-3. NRSV)

Both Matthew and Mark tell the story of the dirty hands. It is one of the most baffling conversations between Jesus and a group of interlocutors—in this case, a group of Pharisees—who challenge the disciples in the name of the dominant religion. Both Gospel writers take us quickly through the conversation because we should already have a sense of the basic idea—which is that (pace Confucius) performing correct rituals is not the same as being a good person. It is not even close.

Growing up in a very orthodox, orthoprax LDS family in the 90s and 00s, I experienced Easter as a rather awkward holiday. We had no Easter bunny, Easter baskets, or anything else that would distract our focus from Jesus; our few activities (egg dyeing, egg hunt) were on Saturday, prefaced by how they were Not The Reason for Easter. 

And so broke Easter morning. We ate our colorful eggs reverently. We got ready for church, sometimes in new clothes (thanks to my mom), but usually not. When there were Easter programs at church, they often focused on Joseph Smith and the Restoration. After church, we stayed in church clothes (like every Sunday), watched church videos (like every Sunday) and got ready for a big dinner (like every Sunday). We’d eat ham instead of pot roast, on fancy china instead of Sunday dishes. We ate a spring-themed dessert (courtesy of my mom) and, for family scripture study, we paused wherever we were in the Standard Works to read the Easter story. 

Conceptually, Easter was A Big Deal – the holiest day of the year, as we reminded each other – our focus solemnly dedicated to “what Jesus did for us.” But that was both as far as it went and what we did every Sunday. So, in practice, Easter was just another Sunday, except with a little extra guilt, a different scripture story, and an extra fork and spoon at each place setting.

As it is Easter, I am returning, as I have many times before, to what is, in my opinion, the finest, most powerful, and most Christian personal essay which Mormon-Americana has yet produced: Eugene England’s “Easter Weekend.” It was originally printed in the Spring 1988 issue of Dialogue, and so is 35 years old this Easter season. You can read the whole thing here. I will include some excerpts below.

Gene has been dead for over 20 years, but his legacy lives on. I didn’t know him well, though there are many members of the BCC community who did. But whether you knew him well or only a little or not at all, we all can re-read his words, and look forward to someday hearing his voice again.

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One hundred and seventy nine years ago, on April 7, 1844, Joseph Smith delivered a sermon to commemorate the death of King Follett, a close friend of his who died a month earlier in a construction accident. Smith spoke for two and a half hours to an audience of around 20,000 people. No exact transcription of the discourse remains, but several extensive reports, mixing quotation, paraphrase, and commentary, survived.

About two years ago, I wrote a piece for Square Two Journal in which I advocated for a move away from military/war imagery in LDS religious discourse. I suggested that even though the Abrahamic tradition has always included such language, the LDS church’s contemporary message is one of “healing for all of creation that is grounded in God’s love” and that “military/war language detracts from what we are actually called to do as Christians generally and as the ‘true and living church’ specifically.” I continue to believe that.

We are rapidly approaching the two-year anniversary of the announcement of the Vienna temple: the 4th of April 2021. I remember the day well. We were all watching conference from home during those pandemic times, so I wasn’t able to see the immediate reactions of my ward, but I’m sure audible gasps echoed around living rooms all around the country. The excitement was felt as far away as North America. People I hadn’t heard from in years—mostly former missionaries I had served with in the Austria Vienna mission in the mid-1990s but also family members and friends—reached out to share felicitations on an occasion that seemed to validate a lot of hard work by a lot of people over decades.

As a missionary, I recall members in a Vienna suburb showing us a map where they thought the temple was going to be built, even labeling it “temple square” (Tempelplatz). I don’t recall how they had determined that that would be the place. It was just an empty field in an unremarkable part of the country, far enough from Vienna that you could afford to build a house and raise a family but not so far that you couldn’t commute into the city for work. There were already a number of member families living there, so maybe someone had purchased the lot and intended to donate it to the church when the time was ripe. See below for details:

At any rate, a temple is something members have been working towards for a very long time.

We’ve all been there. You are sitting in some Sunday School or Auxiliary lesson and some chucklehead goes on and on about how they are so obedient that if God asked them to kill someone, they would. They think they are the height of righteousness because they are chomping at the bit to get some blood on their hands. These people are psychopaths; avoid them if possible. But sometimes they influence people, so here are a few things to help.

I normally avoid the “horizontal harmony” model of New Testament commentary—analysis that takes pieces out of each gospel and strings them together into a single narrative that supposedly tells a single story. That’s just not how narratives work. Each gospel was created to be a complete story in its own right. Each evangelist had different doctrinal and rhetorical objectives, and we miss these when we smush them all together or treat the New Testament like a jigsaw puzzle with nicely interlocking pieces spread across four different boxes.

Guest author Elizabeth Cranford Garcia’s most recent work has appeared in Tar River Poetry, Portland Review, CALYX, Tinderbox Poetry, and Anti-Heroin Chic, is the recipient of the 2022 Banyan Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is the author of Stunt Double and serves as the current Poetry Editor for Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought. Read more of her work at elizabethcgarcia.wordpress.com.

My four-year-old daughter is leaning her whole body over my arm from the back seat, waiting to be dropped off at preschool, reaching to press the “skip” button on the music for the tenth time—a need she’s developed in my habit of allowing her to choose the music in order to persuade her to go to school at all. I’m hungry, eager to get a bite after drop-off, having chosen to exercise, shower, and put on makeup this morning instead of eat (because all my experience with mothering three kids has taught me that to skip my workout will lead to late afternoon burnout, tipping the domino that leads to a depressed and grumpy mommy at bedtime)—and my daughter’s body pressing in on me suddenly evokes a barrage of irritation at all the ways in which I’m expected—by them, by whatever idealized image I have in my head—to go without, to put myself second, in order to mother them. That when I metaphorically raise my hand to protest (“Could you please fill my glass of ice water at the dinner table after I’ve laid it with homemade hot food?”), it’s like I’m suddenly asking for an appendage.

Last Friday our ward celebrated the Relief Society’s 181st anniversary with an ambitious program involving all the organizations: the Relief Society prepared a play in three acts recounting the founding; the Primary was tasked with sewing bonnets for all the women; the Young Women and Young Men decorated the cultural hall; the bishopric set up the sound reinforcement; and the elders quorum was asked to cater dinner in accordance with guidance provided by the Relief Society.

The central feature of the dinner menu was to be roast chicken. There were a lot of moving parts for the dinner, so I decided to delegate the side dishes and deserts to members of the quorum and took responsibility for the main dish myself.

A week before the Relief Society’s gala event, I placed an order for 20 roast chickens at the grocery store deli just down the street from the church to be ready for pickup a half hour before the dinner was scheduled to begin. The same deli had taken care of twice as many chickens for our Christmas party, so I figured they were up to the task. Deli staff were happy to take my order, and when I followed up in person on Wednesday they gave me two thumbs up—everything was on track.

“It is not possible for man to sever the wheat from the tares, the good fish from the other frie; that must be the Angels Ministery at the end of mortall things.”—John Milton, Aeroipagetica

The Kingdom of God is the ultimate ineffable concept: a kind of society that has never existed before and that contradicts every established theory of social or political development. Even its name, “kingdom,” implies a human domination structure that is completely alien to the thing described. To inspire his followers with the possibilities of this society, Jesus must first find ways to describe something for which his audience has no point of reference. This is the central narrative problem of the New Testament: how to eff the ineffable.

The solution to this problem comes in the form of the “Kingdom Parables,” a subset of New Testament parables designed to illustrate some element of the Kingdom. The thirteenth chapter of Matthew is the mother lode of Kingdom Parables. In this one chapter, Jesus gives eight parables, fully interprets two of them, and explains the reasons that he speaks in parables in the first place.

“CHRISTIANA began to knock . . . she knocked and knocked again. But instead of any that answered, they all thought that they heard as if a dog came barking upon them. A dog, and a great one too; and this made the women and children afraid. Nor durst they for awhile to knock any more, for fear the mastiff should fly upon them. . . . . Knock they durst not, for fear of the dog; go back they durst not, for fear that the keeper of that gate should espy them as they so went, and should be offended with them. At last they thought of knocking again, and knocked more vehemently than they did at the first. Then said the keeper of the gate, “Who is there? —John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part II

Even by the standards of 1678, the first volume of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is hostile to women. When the hero, Christian, discovers that he is among the elect, he turns his back on his wife and sets out to find salvation on his own. Though The Pilgrim’s Progress went on to become the bestselling book of the century (and of the next two centuries after that), readers expressed great dismay over the fate of Christian’s wife.