Come, Follow Me July 22-28: Alma 32-35
In 2024, the Maxwell Institute will offer a weekly series of short essays on the Book of Mormon, in support of the Church-wide Come, Follow Me study curriculum. Each week, the Maxwell Institute blog will feature a post by a member of the Institute faculty exploring an aspect of the week’s reading block. We hope these explorations will enrich your study and teaching of the Book of Mormon throughout the coming year.
Planting Love
By Morgan Davis
Scripture does not read itself; no text does. It takes a reader to come along and make sense of the language on the page for it to have meaning that persists in the world. Scripture is a particularly rich site of meaning-making because of all the ways that we, as a community of faith, invest it with authority. One of the ways that meaning is generated as we read is in the questions we ask of the text. As in science, so in reading scripture, the nature of the questions we ask has a powerful effect on the kind of answers we get. As I revisited Alma 32–34 recently, I was intrigued by the interplay of the classic virtues described there.
To briefly review, these are three powerful chapters that are part of the larger story of Alma and Amulek’s labors among the Zoramites, a band of idolaters who had broken away from the Nephites (Alma 31:1–2). Finding that the majority were unteachable but that a subgroup of them who were treated as second-class citizens were humble and ready to be taught, Alma and Amulek deliver a series of answers to their questions about the nature of worship and of salvation that invite our questions as we read. In chapter 32, we have the classic comparison by Alma of the word to a seed planted in the heart and growing into a tree of life. The experiment can lead people from faith to knowledge, he says, as they plant and nurture the seed in faith and then experience the real-world results of the tree’s fruits. Next, Alma responds to the Zoramites’ questions about what practical form their faith in God should take (Alma 33). In his answer, he leads with the example of private prayer from the prophet Zenos, noting that he, as well as Zenock and Moses, pointed in their own prophetic ways to the Son of God as the proper focus of faith, a doctrinal point that the Zoramites as a whole had rejected. Amulek then follows up (Alma 34), adding his witness about the reality of Christ and his atoning sacrifice and exhorting them to again cultivate a Christ-centered faith through prayer, works of charity, ongoing repentance, and patience in afflictions.
As I’ve reread these chapters this year, my curiosity has fallen on the role of the great virtues of faith, hope, and love (or charity) in these discourses. The classic summation of these traveling companions is, of course, 1 Corinthians 13 (echoed in Moroni 7:33–48), where Paul lays them out with unforgettable eloquence. So, when I read a verse like Alma 32:21 (cf. Heb 11:1), for example, which points us not only to faith but also to hope, my curiosity is piqued as to whether love is also somewhere in the mix. When an initial scan of the following several verses doesn’t reveal any explicit mention of it, I’m further intrigued. Is love irrelevant to this discussion, or might I be missing something hiding under my nose?
Then I notice the larger context in which Alma’s discussion of faith and hope is set—the imagery of how to plant and nurture a seedling. Suddenly, I’m reminded of some of the most influential definitions of love I have encountered in literature. One is given by M. Scott Peck in his groundbreaking work, The Road Less Traveled, where he writes that love is “the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”[1] Another is from theologian Thomas Oord, who writes that love is “to act intentionally, in relational response to God and others, to promote overall well-being.”[2] These ideas have influenced my slightly more parsimonious definition of love, which is: “To act relationally in ways that cherish and nurture well-being.” Much can be said about the significance of each part of these definitions, but for purposes of this post, I note that they all share an emphasis on nurturing or promoting growth and well-being, and that is what Alma is talking about as he describes what we must do to grow from faith to knowledge as we tend the word of God that is planted within us, like a seed.
But is nurturing the word like a seed really love? How, for example, is it relational, even if helping something (rather than someone) to grow is a worthwhile kind of care? This is the kind of follow-up question I find energizing, as it leads me back to the text, where we read that as the seed of the word begins to grow within, “ye will begin to say… it must needs be that… the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me…. And ye also know that… your mind doth begin to expand” (Alma 32:28, 34). In these passages, we recognize that the growth that is happening as a result of nurturing the word inwardly is in ourselves. It isn’t just the word that grows; rather, it is the breast and mind in which it is planted that swell and expand. In other words, by nurturing the word of God within us, we are showing love to God (the first great commandment), and we are actually showing love to ourselves in conformity with Jesus’s own summation of the second great commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matt 22:36–39; Mark 12:30–31; cf. Lev. 19:18). The three-fold relationship that is created when we plant the seed within us is one of love for God’s word that in turn nourishes our own well-being and, by the transitive property of grace, our capacity to love others as ourselves.
As Amulek then summarizes and enlarges upon Alma’s teaching, he brings the abstract notion of planting the seed into concrete, actionable terms: “Exercise your faith unto repentance, that ye begin to call upon his holy name,” he says (Alma 34:17). He thus urges on-going prayer and change for the better (repentance) as the first, Godward step, and then, like King Benjamin, immediately follows up with a second step that he says is no less critical: to care for “the needy, and the naked,… the sick and afflicted” (Alma 34:28, cf. Mosiah 4:16 ff.). So, in Amulek’s version of this pattern, the turn that comes about in us as a result of cherishing the word is again towards charity or love. As in the teachings of Paul and Moroni, so again here in Alma and Amulek, we find that faith, hope, and love participate in one another. Planting in faith leads to the swelling of love that fills us with “a firm hope” in Christ (Alma 34:40).
[1] M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Touchstone, 2003), 81.
[2] Thomas Jay Oord, Pluriform Love: An Open and Relational Theology of Well-Being (SacraSage Press, 2022), chapter 2, “Love Defined.”
IMAGES
Jay Bryant Ward, Seed of Faith. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/seed-of-faith-2/].
Ben Crowder, If Ye Give Place, 2023. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/seed-of-faith/].
Rebecca Woodword, “Now We Will Compare the Word Unto a Seed”, 2020. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/now-we-will-compare-the-word-unto-a-seed/].
