Kimberly Matheson Wonder of Scripture Lecture Skip to main content
Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

Kimberly Matheson Wonder of Scripture Lecture

Wonder of Scripture: Kimberly Matheson

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Kim Matheson: Hello, my friends. Thank you for being here. It's very different to be behind the microphone at this stage of the lecture. I help organize and run this series. And I prefer the organizing and running to the speaking in. But I'm glad that you're here. Thank you. Sorry if I messed up camera sight lines. Here we go.

This past Sunday, I gathered my family into our living room, turned off all the lights, and lit a candle. It was an Advent candle, one of five, that we will light between now and Christmas. I've been lighting these candles with my family since 2014 when I decided that we needed more Jesus in our December, more Christ, and less consumerism. And so I turned to the broader world of Christian liturgy for inspiration. If you were to attend mass during the month of December, or to visit the home of an especially observant Catholic friend, you would find the same thing that's in my living room right now. A wreath with five candles, each representing a different Christian virtue, and each one lit successively week after week as we wait for Christ to arrive. December is a month full of Santa Claus and Amazon mailers and candy canes and Target sales and overproduced Mariah Carey songs. It's a month when you start your shopping on Black Friday and you ramp it up on Cyber Monday and you keep a steady supply of packages coming every week to your door. And boy, doesn't two-day shipping really come in clutch on December 22nd. Ask me how I know.

Over the past 10 years, I have felt a growing need to claw back my calendar and my wallet and fix my children's eyes on the baby in the manger. So every Sunday in December, we end the day by sitting in darkness and contemplating great light. As we light more candles each week, we talk about the growing illumination the Savior brings into our lives. And as we feel the shadows of our living room press in around us, it's easier to imagine the dark hillside where a shepherd sat, and the nights through which the wise men walked, and the cramped darkness of a stable that was also at best lit only by firelight. During the Christmas season, during Advent, I feel a truth that is easy to forget at other times of the year, and it's this. Not all times are created equal. The clock drags when you're waiting for the bell to ring at the end of class, or when you're doing 60 seconds of abdominal exercises, but it races when you're in the last chapter of an exciting book or watching the finale of Stranger Things. Every time a holiday rolls around, someone in your family inevitably says, I can't believe it's been a whole year since we last did this. And if you were to ask any mother on the day of her child's high school graduation if it feels like a full 18 years since that baby was placed in her arms, she would tell you that it feels more like 18 seconds. Not all times are created equal. And that's especially true of the times that have to do with Christ. There's a reason that December feels so magical, and Easter morning is unusually bright and fresh. And theologians even have a word for it.

Typology describes the relationship between two events in history, a type and an anti-type. The anti-type, that's your main event. That's the thing to which the type is pointing. It can be an event, but it can also be a person or a thing. So Adam is a type of Christ, according to Saint Paul. When Lazarus was raised from the dead, that was a type of the resurrection. And the Sabbath is a type of God's rest on creation's seventh day. But as soon as I put this slide up, I've already misled you a little bit, because looking at this diagram, you might think that this is going to be a talk about symbolism. That the Sabbath is just a symbol of divine rest, Adam is simply a symbol of Christ, and typology must just be a fancy word that people with PhDs made up to make your life harder for the next 30 minutes. But typology is not just a fancy word for symbolism. Here's the difference. Symbolism focuses on these, on the things that are put in relation. But typology focuses on the arrow.

The word typology comes from a Greek word, tupos, that means the mark left by a blow. So think, if you will, about the bruise left under your eye when you got punched at recess in third grade. The tupos, the type, is that bruise. And this, by the way, is also why we talk about movable type in older printing presses. So the type is the piece of metal that strikes the paper and leaves a mark. What makes typology different from mere symbolism is first that it focuses more on the arrow than on the things the arrow points to. But second, the arrow also points the other way. The anti-type is the main event, not because it's what the type points to, but because it's the cause of the type in the first place. The type is the mark left by the anti-type. But here we're not talking about fights at recess or bits of metal hitting paper. Here, the thing getting smacked is history, and the thing doing the smacking is not some burly sixth grader, it's the divine work of salvation. The redemption wrought for us by Christ was a shock on history. It blew apart everything we know about how the world works, about the finality of death, about how sin might determine our futures. The atonement was a shock, and the explosive force of that shock blew shrapnel through history, cutting it open in new places. leaving bits of redemption lodged in other eras. Here's how I'd put it. Types are the marks left in history by the explosive force of God's redemptive grace. Typology names the fact that when God reaches into history in the shape of his son, the walls of time start to get a little wobbly, and the imprint of redemption starts to leak out to other times and events. Christ's atonement is powerful enough to reach back centuries and touch Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac or the symbols of the law of Moses. The resurrection is powerful enough to reach forward and touch our future reunion with loved ones who have passed on.

I really love the way that the scholar Charles Taylor describes this. He says, “secular time is what to us is ordinary time. Indeed to us it's just time period. One thing happens after another and when something is passed, it's passed. But higher times gather and reorder secular time. They introduce warps and seeming inconsistencies in profane time ordering. Events which were far apart in profane time could nevertheless be closely linked. For instance, the relation in which events of the Old Testament were held to stand to those in the New, for instance, the sacrifice of Isaac and the crucifixion of Christ. Those two events were linked through their immediate contiguous places in the divine plan. They are drawn close in eternity, even though they're centuries apart. As a result, Good Friday 1998 is closer, in a way, to the original day of the crucifixion than Midsummer's Day 1997.” Or for you and I in this room, Christmas Eve this year will put us closer to Christ's birth than we were at the beginning of the semester, even though that's not how it would look on a timeline.

When we talk about typology we're talking about the way that time warps around redemptive events, allowing Christ's coming to leave marks all over history. And I take it that this matters very much to us as disciples because we are working to make our lives into types of Christ in the very same way. We want to be closer to him than the normal ordering of things would seem to allow. We want our habits, behaviors, expressions, tastes, all of this to bear the imprint of what he wrought on our behalf. We want our countenance to bear his image and our wills to mirror his. And if ever there were a perfect season for training us in this typological work of discipleship, it is the Christmas season. Because in December, the walls of history grow extra thin.

So, in light of Christmas, of these higher times where Jesus is closer to us, here's the question I want to address this morning. How do we do it? If Christ's coming warps time in this way, allowing other events and other people to bear his image? What does that mean for our discipleship? How do we keep our eyes peeled for types of Christ? And even more, how do we become types of Christ ourselves? And to answer that question, I want to take you into the scriptures, to another dark room where I've been sitting for the past several months, another room lit by fire in anticipation of Christ's coming. Late in the Book of Mormon, Two Nephite missionaries find themselves encircled by divine fire in a Lamanite prison. Their captors are terrified, naturally, especially when divine fire is then augmented by earthquakes, a cloud of darkness, and a piercing voice from heaven condemning their treatment of these prophets. Nevertheless, the Lamanite jailers make their way through. They learn faith in Christ, and by the end of the story, find themselves encircled by fire as the heavens open and angels descend. This is Helaman chapter five. It is a singular event in the Book of Mormon, certainly one of the most dramatic conversion scenes and arguably the most pivotal for the Lamanites in the whole book. But what draws my attention to this chapter this morning is that it bears unmistakable echoes of the events surrounding Christ's visit to the Nephites, from the fire and cloud of darkness that preceded Christ's arrival to a piercing voice out of heaven and the ministrations of fire and angels that occurred during the Savior's two-day ministry.

Helaman 5 is a piece of shrapnel lodged in the Book of Mormon by the explosive force of Christ's arrival in 3rd Nephi. And for that reason, it makes a spectacular case study in how typology works and what it means for our discipleship. So here's the text. I'm well aware that it's much too small to read. That's not the point. I just want to lay out visually all of the marks that 3rd Nephi leaves on the text of Helaman 5. And as best I can tell, they come in three layers. So the first layer, These are all the echoes of the destruction just before Christ's arrival. Some of them are direct verbal echoes. Those are the ones that I've highlighted in red. And others are just kind of more thematic. So I've underlined those in red instead. But it's things like language of burning, a cloud of darkness, there's a voice talking about repentance, the earth shaking, all of that kind of thing. Our second layer comes from 3 Nephi 11, very specifically, in the moments just prior to Christ's arrival. So here we have things like a voice that speaks three times, it pierces even to the very soul, and the viewers in the scene see something that looks to them like an angel. And our third layer, you can tell that it's reserved mostly for the final scene in the prison, where here we have echoes of angelic ministrations from Christ's two-day visit to the people, being encircled by fire, filled with the Holy Ghost, ministered to by angels, all very clear echoes of 3 Nephi 17 and 19.

So the conversation between these two chapters, these two events, is, as you can see, quite sustained, quite complex. For our purposes this morning, I just want to focus on two verses, and they're the verses that stand out to me for how densely colored they are, for how really, especially strong 3rd Nephi is leaving its marks. This is where 3rd Nephi marks the text most clearly. I'm gonna start with verse 30, which is here. It's one of those rare moments in Scripture when we hear the voice of God. And rarer still, this verse lingers on the quality of the divine voice, describing what it's like to hear the Father speaking out of heaven. “It was not a voice of thunder,” we're told. “Neither was it a voice of a great tumultuous noise, but behold, it was a still voice of perfect mildness, as if it had been a whisper. And it did pierce even to the very soul. And notwithstanding the mildness of the voice, behold, the earth shook exceedingly.” Not loud, not violent, but still and mild and nonetheless piercing. Readers of the Book of Mormon will be immediately reminded of another voice out of heaven. This time it was “not a harsh voice, neither was it a loud voice. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding it being a small voice, it did pierce them that did hear to the center, insomuch that there was no part of their frame that it did not cause to quake, and it did pierce them to the very soul and did cause their hearts to burn.”

The connections here seem both obvious and deliberate. Both verses twice describe what the voice was not before describing what it was. Both use the language of piercing to the very soul and both voices cause some kind of trembling or shaking. But here's the surprising thing. Weirdly enough, the voices themselves are not described in similar terms. The rhythm of the verses is similar, the effects of the voice are identical, but the voices themselves are characterized differently. In 3rd Nephi 11, the voice is described adjectively as neither harsh nor loud, but in Helaman 5, it's a nominal description, a question of thunder and a great tumultuous noise. In 3rd Nephi 11, the voice is small, but in Helaman 5, it is still instead. If Mormon so evidently wants us to read these two verses alongside each other, why would he not seal the deal? Why not port over from 3rd Nephi 11 the concrete descriptions of the voice alongside the grammatical similarities and the identical aftermath? After all, this is how intertextual allusion usually works. We know when Nephi is quoting from Isaiah because he relies on the same nouns and verbs. He talks about a voice crying from the dust. We know that Moroni and Paul struggled in similar ways because the Lord comforts them both with the reassurance that his grace is sufficient and that he will make weak things strong. But here, the strongest similarities lie not with nouns and adjectives. They lie with everything that surrounds them, with the rhythm of the passage, the supporting grammar, the shifters and transitions, with it was not, and neither was it, and notwithstanding.

When Helaman 5 registers the typological impact of God's voice, what bears the mark seems to be the connective tissue of the verse rather than its terminology. It's the ligaments of the passage that bear the bruise rather than the bones. But as surprising as this might be at the level of the text, it is not necessarily all that surprising at the level of typology. This, remember, is how typology works. It's not so much about the events on either side of the arrow as it is about the fact of the arrow in the first place, this link across historical distance. It's the ligaments of time that bear the bruise of redemption, the real substance of a typological relationship lies in the connective tissue between two salvifically implicated events. And from this I want to draw our first lesson. To be a disciple is not just to relate to the nouns and adjectives of redemption. It's to scaffold your life on scriptural grammars. What connects Adam and Christ is not just that one was the first to die and the other the first to resurrect, or that one caused the fall and the other fixed it. What connects them perhaps even more intimately is the shared grammar of that redemptive story. Despite falling, Adam will be redeemed. Despite dying, Christ rose from the dead. So much of the poignancy of scripture relies on these often overlooked hinges. I was recently reminded of this while reading a passage by James Goldberg in one of my favorite books. Recalling the story of the Exodus, he says this. “Ages ago, they say the Israelites spent a last night as slaves in Egypt. They packed up their bags, borrowed their neighbor's jewelry, spread lamb's blood on the doorposts, and when it was done, the Israelites got up and they walked away and away and away for the next 40 years.” If we were talking simply about symbolism today, we might focus on the nouns or the verbs of this story. But it's in that adverb that Goldberg conjures the 40 years in the wilderness and all the others of God's people who have been cast out or lost or put on boats or set wandering. It's not just the fact that Israel walked that's important, but that they walked away and away and away. Verbs can tell you something about time, but adverbs are where those times meet the full richness. If their own most possibility.

More concretely, we might also think of the sacrament. What's important in the sacrament ordinance are not just the nouns and proper names. Obviously vital, those are. We find our place in the sacrament prayers in the surrounding grammar that puts those nouns and names into circulation. Things like in the name of, and we witness, and that they may, and always. These are the terms that allow the ordinance to function like a kind of salvific madlib–if I can be forgiven for such a trivial metaphor. Different names, yours and mine, come to fill in the blanks of the same narrative pattern, all under the authority of the ultimate signatory of Christ in whose name this ordinance began in the first place. The scaffolding of a story is just as important as the headline plots and characters. This is why fairy tales are so enchanting. It's not just because of the princess and the castle and the wicked witch, but because they start with once upon a time and end with happily ever after. What captivates us about Harry Potter has less to do with the main characters and much more to do with the wizarding world that unfolds their story. The quirks of Hogwarts castle, the goofiness of the Weasley brothers, the risk of all flavored jelly beans and the whimsy of moving chess boards. Redemption is also a story. And the subtleties of its unfolding, the small hinges and modest conjunctions and minute adverbial phrases are every bit as important as the main characters or the happy ending at which we will all inevitably arrive. It's not just that we will be resurrected, it's the fact that we will rise in spite of death. It's not just that we are forgiven, it's that we are forgiven notwithstanding our fallen natures.

So too with Helaman 5, the important thing is not just the voice from heaven, it's that they heard that voice above a cloud of darkness after burnings and earthquakes, in preparation for being filled with the Holy Ghost as if with fire, notwithstanding the voice's mildness. When Christ shocks history with the power of his atonement and resurrection, the connective tissue of scripture bears the marks just as much as do its headlining characters. And to be disciples means grafting our lives onto that scriptural grammar. I trust that if we do so, we will find our lives enriched by the full dimension of the redemptive story. OK, so much for our first verse. Now let me draw your attention to the second, verse 43. If verse 30 stood out for how densely colored it is, verse 43 stands out for how multi-colored it is. It is the only verse in the chapter to refer to each of the three scenes from 3rd Nephi that I find relevant here. Several colorful threads run through Helaman 5, but verse 43 is the one moment where they come together in a single knot. The dispersal of the cloud of darkness is a clear echo of the destruction's ending in 3 Nephi 10. Casting eyes about is a clear echo of 3 Nephi 11. And being encircled about by fire takes us into the miracles associated with Christ's two-day ministry in 3 Nephi 17 and 19. It seems, to my eyes at least, that 3 Nephi leaves a stronger mark here than anywhere else in the chapter. And to think about why that might be, let's hold that first lesson close. I want to take my own advice for a moment. What happens if we pay attention to the connective tissue of this verse? It turns out that we find a funny little hiccup. When they saw, they saw. In one instant, the Lamanites perceive two things. They see that the cloud of darkness was dispersed, and they see that they're encircled by fire. But the text refuses to let us read these as sequential. We're not told that after they saw one, they saw the other or that seeing one, they also saw the other, two sites pinned to one and the same perceptual instant. Grammatically speaking, the Lamanites are seeing double. Now I don't doubt that it's possible to read this as sequential or to assume that the two sites, maybe they registered so quickly that Mormon felt justified kind of bundling them into a single moment. But I do wanna stick with the strong reading for at least a moment here, because whether or not he meant to, I think Mormon has given us a beautiful formula for exactly what's happening in typology. Typology is a kind of seeing double. To be a Christian means learning how to conjugate two sites at once.

When you see your sins, can you also see at the same moment their redemption in Christ? When you face a medical or financial tragedy, can you also see at the same moment it's being swallowed up in the resurrection? When the early Christians read Isaiah 7, they saw Christ's birth. When the New Testament disciples encountered fig trees, they remembered his prophecies of the last days. When Nephi and Jacob observed the symbols of the law of Moses, they saw the atonement of their savior. And when my family sees the advent candles on our wreath, we see Christ's first and second comings doubled up into a single timestamp on history. But lest we misunderstand this point, let's also combine it with one of the savior's most famous teachings about sight. The typological task of seeing double is not, I think, a contradiction of the Savior's counsel to keep our eyes single. Rather, seeing double is exactly what happens when we do. It's what happens when we lock our eyes so solidly on Christ that everything else becomes split and out of focus by contrast. It's like when you hold your finger in front of your face. If you've never done this before, now's your moment to try it. But if you look straight at it, your finger is single and self-same. But if you focus past your finger on a point in the distance, right, the far wall, the image of your finger splits in two. Here in Helaman 5, the Lamanites are seeing double precisely because they have learned to focus singly on the one who outstrips every local appearance. It's precisely because they've learned to keep their eyes single to Christ.

That's what happens, in other words, when we take this diagram. Oh, there's your finger. We take this diagram and render it in three dimensions rather than two. This is a PowerPoint slide. I'm well aware this is not three dimensions, but work with me, right? The idea is you take that first diagram and rotate it to look at it from the top. The task is to focus so singly on Christ that everything else comes out of focus, splitting into the translucent images through which Jesus shines. You lock your eyes on him so securely that everything else loses their boundaries and can start to bear his imprint. If we focus our eyes, for instance, on that far-off second coming of Christ, it changes every Christmas into a celebration not just of the baby Jesus, but also an anticipatory foretaste of His return and the rejoicing and festivity that will accompany that day as well. Fix your eyes on that distant point when you will personally meet your Savior, and notice how it makes your sins hazy around the edges, how you can see through and beyond them to Christ's open arms. With an eye single to him, notice how your calling comes to look a lot more like an integral part of the body of Christ, and less like a personal inconvenience, or how the people around you lose their everyday banality and begin to resemble the beloveds for whom Jesus also died. In the end, every one of our trials and sins and questions and troubles is like that finger in front of our face, solid and all-consuming, until we learn to focus beyond it achieving the same Christ-focused double-sight that we see in Helaman 5. Every cloud of darkness is just an opaque moment in history that we have not yet learned how to conjugate with redemption.

In fact, if Helaman 5 teaches us anything, it's that you don't have to be one of the lucky disciples in the New Testament or Third Nephi to know Christ's presence. The Lamanite jailers of this obscure prison have the same experience that will be had in the presence of Christ in a future time and place. The promise of typological discipleship is that Christ's presence is available independent of our historical location. We don't have to be jealous of other disciples or envious of transcendent miracles that we don't get to witness in our secular age. The shrapnel is shot through everywhere. As I understand it, discipleship means rewriting the whole world piece by piece in the light of the salvation wrought in Christ, allowing his typological work to imprint every feature of our lives. It is no easy task. Done rightly, it will take a lifetime, probably more. And done rightly, it will mean enlisting scripture as one of our primary tools. It will mean rewriting our political postures in light of Matthew 5, our family relationships in light of Jacob 2 and 3, our housework in light of Luke 10. Does Isaiah 6 inform your temple experience? D&C 59, How you eat Sunday dinner. Does 3 Nephi 11 inform your approach to ministering and Mosiah 18, your friendships? Do you hold the resurrection close in hospital rooms and the atonement close in prisons? Is the law of consecration on your forehead and wrists and door posts every time you pull your credit card out of your wallet? This is the work of discipleship, finding the bits of redemption that have been blown through history or lodged in scripture, gathering them by the armful until our life becomes itself one more of those types.

Here then are the two lessons that I draw so far from my reading of Helaman 5. First, remember, scaffold your life on scriptural grammars, on the not withstandings and never the lesses of what Christ has wrought for you. Watch how doing so rewrites your life as a story of redemption. But second, fix your eyes on the far horizon of the Savior until everything else grows hazy and the double image of his redemptive grace shines through. Watch how doing so disperses clouds of darkness from your life. For my money, the Christmas season is the best time to train ourselves in this work because the times draw so close. Christmas is, start over, Christ's birth lodges particularly deep in history. It's an anti-type with an especially strong punch. And as proof, I want to close by offering one more typological surprise tucked away in Helaman 5. It's a bit of double sight of my own, something that appeared as I prepared these remarks. Even a cursory reading of this chapter makes clear that we're meant to connect Nephi and Lehi with angels. When their faces shine miraculously through the darkness, we're told that they did shine even as the faces of angels. And when the Lamanites witness Nephi and Lehi in the attitude of talking to some being whom they beheld, we come to learn that they are, in fact, conversing with the angels of God. But it turns out that we can put a finer point on this angelic quality. When the Lamanites encounter their prisoners at the opening of the scene, frightened to find them encircled by fire, Nephi and Lehi immediately comfort their jailers with the words, “fear not,” and an explanation that “it is God that has shown unto you this marvelous thing.” When their words are then accentuated with a voice from heaven, God identifies them as “servants sent to declare good tidings.” Reading this description in the season of Advent for me brings very particular angels to mind. Those who also opened their announcement with the words, fear not, and identified themselves as bringers of good tidings sent to explain what God was showing unto you. What's more, the story in Helaman 5 ends with a pronouncement of peace and the appearance of many more fire-encircled characters than there had been at the beginning of the scene. In a very direct way, Helaman 5 concludes with a whole host of angels and with the glory of the Lord shining round about.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the events of Helaman 5 are suspended between the two halves of the angels' message to the shepherds. The Lamanite jailers, who you might remember, are also tasked with keeping watch, must learn how to transition from being sore afraid to seeking the Christ child. Under the weight of Christ's birth, Helaman 5 grows hazy around the edges and elements of the Christmas story start to shine through. The prison starts to feel more like the stable in which Christ first came to earth. The shaking prison walls remind me of Mary's Magnificat in which she proclaims the power of a God who overturns the might of the world, or Luke 4, in which Christ announces the liberation of the captive. And when the voice from heaven pierces even to the very soul, all I can see is the image that Simeon foretold of Mary, whose soul would also be pierced through by the unique griefs entailed upon the mother of God. This year, as I read Helaman 5, I can't shake the feeling that just off to the side, barely outside of the frame, if we could only turn our heads and see it, we might find a manger filled with hay cradling an especially precious baby. Somewhere between the two halves of the angel's message in Luke 2, there's a moment when the shepherd's terror is exchanged for peace and joy. Helaman 5, I think wedges itself into that slight gap. It takes that hairs breadth instant between the two halves of the angels message and stretches it out to cover 28 verses. I cherish the way this moment is drawn out because as I understand it, this moment between fear and joy, between anticipation and fulfillment, between darkness and finally finding Christ, this moment is the time of advent, it is the time of discipleship and it is one of those temporal ligaments that bears the mark of salvation. We are all of us in the season of waiting, both the immediate countdown until the semester ends and finals are over and Christmas arrives, but even more urgently the countdown of days until Christ returns for the second time to carry off triumphant this final dispensation.

Discipleship is made of nothing but the moments in which we wait, for the next time the Spirit strikes us with inspiration or the next time we see one of those rare miracles letting us know just how intimately aware heaven is of the particularities of our lives. Discipleship is a long string of patience and enduring to the end until the heavens open for us too. And we can talk face to face with the Lord who for the moment still resides above the cloudy veil that darkens mortality. This Christmas season, I love Helaman 5 for illustrating that moment, for reminding us that even in the Christmas story, there are so many periods of waiting the nine months of Mary's tense pregnancy, Joseph's long nights of worry for his family, the years these new parents spent in exile, the weeks-long trek of the wise men, and just how long Israel had yearned for its Messiah, and how long they would keep waiting even after he came. Helaman 5, with all its typological bruises and fiery imprints of so many of Christ's comings, is itself a kind of advent candle lit in history. It is a foretaste of the light to come in Christ's birth, and then again when he appears among the Nephites, and then again in the Sacred Grove, and again in the Kirtland Temple, and again and again and again, until he returns as he will for a final triumphant time. Not all seasons are created equal. History finds itself denatured at the hands of a savior whose redemption outstrips even time, which means that right now, as then and as ever, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

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