By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

The Seven Words of Jesus.

These chapters deal with the consummation of the ministry of Jesus: his suffering, crucifixion, and atoning death on the cross.

It’s first worth reflecting on the bizarre enormity of this event, and the extent to which the centuries have normalized it. It’s cliché among Christians to say that the faithful Jews of Jesus’s day did not expect a Messiah like him, but it’s worth pointing out exactly how logical this was, and how consistent with human nature.

It is easy in retrospect to valorize persecution and condemn persecutors: many religious groups (the Saints included) do this cultural work. Witness how the Church today remembers the arrest and imprisonment of Joseph Smith in Missouri, absolving him from any wrongdoing and attributing to him only righteous anger and noble sentiments. But how might we react today should the president of the church, say, storm into the Capitol Building in Washington DC, vandalize and destroy it, and be arrested and tried for treason?

How comfortable are we with a truly countercultural faith; one which would undermine those embedded assumptions that nearly all Americans take for granted: the comforts of our wealth and leisure, our fixation on our consumer-driven lifestyles, our shared devotion to meritocracy?  How many of us would, like Peter, James, and John do in the Gospel of Mark, willingly give up our incomes and jobs and homes and begin to live as roaming, wandering preachers, if Jesus asked us to? To what extent do we see Jesus in the homeless, the poor, the oppressed, and are we really ready to do what it takes to be with them and stand with them? Or would we uncomfortably call following in Peter’s footsteps cultish and wait for the Netflix documentary?  Are we too satisfied with the easy prejudices that come with assuming that our own lifestyles and traditions and tastes are (luckily) the same as God’s?

Indeed, the Jews were expecting the Messiah to offer political liberation from the Romans, because their scripture and tradition and expectations had taught them to. The analogue to Jesus in the Hebrew Bible was King David, God’s “messiah”—which means, simply, God’s anointed one. The Hebrew prophets repeatedly affirm that God’s kingdom would come again, and, of course, David had created that kingdom before. They were comfortable with a faith which conformed to their cultural expectations, and so, very often, are we.

So when Jesus begins preaching, as Matthew puts it, the “gospel of the kingdom of God,” how are we to understand that?  How does Jesus challenge the ways in which we are blind to the kingdom of justice, mercy, and redemption that he calls us to? How does the crucifixion shatter the ways that we are blind to the injustices and sins which must be eradicated before that kingdom might come forth?

Across the four gospels, Jesus speaks seven times while on the cross. These utterances are called the “seven words” of Jesus, and given the traditional order, they mark a progression to the kingdom of God; Jesus enacting and creating what he has so often promised and taught.
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How does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints view Homosexuality as a whole (the concept and its implications, rather than the acts of any particular individual or group).

In the summer of 2014 a German tourist went hiking with her dog leashed to her waist in the Austrian Alps. She was walking along a publicly maintained road leading through an alpine pasture when a small herd of mother cows and their calves charged the hiker’s dog from behind. Because the dog was fixed to her waist, and she did not hear the cows coming, the tourist ended up being trampled and suffered mortal injuries.

For ten years, I was this guy: the goofball priesthood leader who volunteered for Girls Camp. I promised myself and others that I’d go as long as I had daughters going to camp; since college professors don’t work much during the summer, and since the stake was always scrambling to find a few men who were able and willing to spend a whole week playing water-carrier, blessing-giver, tent-erector, and general rented-mule for over a hundred young women, it worked out well. But times change and leadership changes, and this summer, though two of our daughters are leaving tomorrow morning (one for her fourth and final year, one for her second), I won’t be going with them to spray hornets, lead hikes, play lifeguard, or contribute to some ridiculous skit at their side. Instead, since this year’s camp is taking place rather close to our city of Wichita, each ward was asked to send multiple individuals one day at a time to get a brief Girls Camp experience, and I wasn’t one our bishop picked. I kind of miss it already. [Read more…]

Matthew 26; Mark 14; Luke 22; John 18

Son of Man, Huh? What Does That Even Mean?
The four chapters in this lesson correlate, to a remarkable degree, the events leading up to Christ’s arrest by Jewish authorities on the Thursday night of Holy week. These events include the Last Supper, the prayer in Gethsemane, Judas’s betrayal of Jesus, and Peter’s thrice-repeated denial of his Master. I will use the text in Matthew as the basis for the lesson, adding in insights from the other Gospels as appropriate.

It’s that time of year again–time for some serious Mormon History Association action at the Sheraton on Fifth South in Salt Lake City. For those who are participating in the conference, please post your notes, comments and observations here. Those who are unable to be there in person will greatly appreciate whatever nuggets you are able to share. [Read more…]

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]

Michael Austin (who, for the record, is an old and close friend) does not fit most people’s stereotype of a “patriot,” the sort of person would would proudly fly an American flag and attend parades on Memorial Day. After all, he’s an academic, a cosmopolitan, a liberal Democrat, a scholar of 17th-century English rhetoric, Mormon environmentalism, world literature, and the book of Job; when he wrote an earlier book about the Founding Fathers, it was entirely about how right-wing patriots completely misunderstand them. So it would be easy to assume that Michael’s attachment to the idea of “America” would be distant, contextual, and intellectual at best.

That assumption would be wrong–or mostly wrong, anyway. You’d very likely be correct about the flag and the parades. But Michael’s latest book, We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America’s Civic Tradition, makes it clear that his attachment to–indeed, his “belief” in–the civic idea of America is both serious and strong. As long as I’ve known the man, it surprised me to see in these pages so much genuine passion and concern over the direction of the United States at the present moment. When he takes a line from the famous closing paragraph of Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address–“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies”–as his title, he really means it: he really believes that America’s liberal democracy both provides a vital opportunity for, and levies upon us all a specific demand for, friendship. That friendship is, in his view, essential to America’s “civic tradition”; democratic legitimacy in the American state–to say nothing of good government–is impossible without it. [Read more…]

Thanks to Calvin Burke for sharing this very personal story.

** All identifying details have been changed to protect privacy. I loved this boy too much to tell you or anyone else who he is. You will never find him; don’t even try.

The problem is, when he smiles, he knocks stars out of the sky. [Read more…]

This post is a review of Lincoln H. Blumell, editor, New Testament History, Culture, and Society: A Background to the Texts of the New Testament (Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, in cooperation with Deseret Book Company, Salt Lake City, 2019). 836 pages.

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Barbara Brown Taylor is perhaps the best thinker and writer that I ever blew the chance to hear live. Several years ago, I attended a conference at which she and Miroslov Volf were the featured speakers. Volf was the opening plenary speaker, and Taylor was the closing plenary speaker. I was not familiar with Taylor at the time, and I had a fairly small menu of flights to choose from when I booked the flight. So I chose an evening flight back home that required me to miss the closing session. To make up for it, I bought An Altar in the World and read it in the flight. By the time I landed, I realized what a mistake I had made.

Today it’s in the news that President Nelson went and met with Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s Prime Minister. This was a little bit more interesting than just any meeting with a world leader for two reasons: (1) Ardern has been widely praised recently for her leadership, including her response to violence in her country, and (2) Ardern herself was raised in the church, but says she left the church in 2005 and currently identifies herself as agnostic.

But this post isn’t about that meeting, it’s about how we print and bind the scriptures. President Nelson made a gift to Ardern of what appears to be a very nice Deseret Book “Legacy Edition” of the Book of Mormon. It’s a nicely done hardcover edition that would look beautiful on a shelf, but it’s pretty pricey retailing around $100. Anyway, that got me thinking about what my ideal edition of the scriptures for my personal use would look like if I could design it myself.

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Matthew 21–23; Mark 11; Luke 19–20; John 12

These passages cover Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem and his cleansing of the Temple. John puts the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of Christ’s ministry; the three synoptics (Matthew, Mark, Luke) put it toward the end. It is the inciting incident which leads the Jerusalem elite to seek Jesus’s death for Matthew, Mark, and Luke; as Mark has it, in 11:18 (KJV):

And the scribes and chief priests heard it, and sought how they might destroy him: for they feared him, because all the people was astonished at his doctrine.

How should we understand what was happening here?  The first thing to note is that the people doing business at the temple were not necessarily doing wrong, so we cannot read this story as a critique of a self-evident crime; it’s not as though these were people hanging around selling souvenirs in a sacred place.
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Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought has long served as the journal of record for the intellectual and cultural life of the Mormon people. Thanks to five decades of work by editors, authors, and the Board, Dialogue  continues to provide space for some of the faith’s most vibrant thinking on cultural, historical, theological, and social issues. To further this mission, we have recently completed a transition that has made all content freely available on our new website at the moment of publication and given us a more substantial internet presence with web-only content. Beginning in 2020, we will transition our production operations to the University of Illinois Press. With these actions, Dialogue will retain its status as a crucial voice in modern Mormonism. To continue this tradition, and in accordance with the journal’s transition to a new production model, Dialogue’s Board of Directors announces a search for a new editor to take control starting with the Summer 2020 issue.

The readings for this lesson deal with a few different substantive topics: Marriage and divorce, the role of material wealth in a disciple’s life, prayer, soteriology (the theology of what it means to be saved and how we are saved), church leadership, children, and miraculous healing.

But if there is a unifying theme to these readings it is how Jesus’s teaching often disrupt what are often our natural or cultural beliefs about what is righteous and call us to believe and practice something that is much harder to believe, and much more demanding to practice. We naturally and culturally want to believe that we can be righteous by following the rules, and that therefore, if we just find out the right rules, we can make ourselves righteous and earn salvation or exaltation or blessings by following them.

But Jesus’s message over and over in these readings is that following the rules won’t make you righteous. Instead, if you want to become righteous you have to become a fundamentally different kind of person. The kind of person that humbles himself as a child, sells all that he has and gives it to the poor, serves others, and rather than glorying in his obedience to the commandments, begs only to be forgiven for all the ways he has failed to keep them, and follows Jesus all the way to the cross. [Read more…]

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Last month, the The New York Times set its sights on children’s artwork, publishing two articles on sorting out the stuff your kids bring home—”I Love Throwing My Kids’ Artwork in the Garbage While They’re Sleeping” and “How to Keep Kids’ Art From Cluttering Up Your Home“—on the same day. I’m not sure what was in the air that April day that prompted the news powerhouse to devote two parenting features to the same topic, but I’m sure that most adults who care for children can relate to the problem of dealing with the things they bring home or make. My daughter’s artistic output hasn’t been nearly as prodigious since learning how to read, but for a while the preschool was asking us to bring in more paper since it was our kid who was using most of it.