Come, Follow Me April 1-7: Jacob 1-4
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.
Anxious Love and a Firm Mind
By Rachael G. Johnson
The writings of Jacob, Lehi and Sariah’s “first-born in the wilderness,” are charged with a peculiar energy. His words skitter across waves of anxious responsibility, into troughs of grim prophecy and admonishment, through eddies of aching and tender compassion. Tasked as one of the Nephites’ first anointed teachers and priests shortly before the death of his elder brother Nephi, “the protector” (1:10), Jacob feels the burden keenly; he references writing under Nephi’s “commandment” three times within the first few verses of his opening chapter (v. 1, 2, 8).
Perhaps in affirming that he is keeping a commandment in recording his prophecies and teachings on the small plates, Jacob is clinging to the straightforward security of the promise his father gave to Laman and Lemuel: “Inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land; but inasmuch as ye will not keep my commandments ye shall be cut off from my presence” (2 Nephi 1:20). But Jacob’s writings-- and those of Lehi, Nephi, Moroni, and many other Book of Mormon authors writing in the wake of violent schisms, unreconciled traumas, and heartbreak-- expose the unsettling risks of a promise that is deeply familial and interdependent. The “ye” is always collective; sin always wreaks collateral damage.
For this reason, I find Jacob’s persistent reference to feeling “anxiety” to be entirely and poignantly legible. “Anxiety” is not a word one finds anywhere in the Old or New Testament, yet it appears several times in the intimate and ultimately unresolved family-civilizational dramas of the Book of Mormon, especially in the writings of Jacob, his father, Lehi (see especially 2 Nephi 1:13-18), and subsequently Alma (see Alma 13:27).
For all the negative connotations of anxiety, Jacob rehabilitates it as a holy force when it is a fruit of love and a spur to faith. “Anxiety” appears in Jacob’s writings as a relentless yearning born of a mortal love keenly aware of its restraints, both chosen and unchosen.
For love to be love, it cannot force; anxiety is the expression of love’s voluntary powerlessness: Shake yourselves! Loose yourselves! Jacob cries. Mortal love must contend with the opacity of mortal minds and bodies that cannot transparently communicate or self-disclose: Awake from slumber! Arouse your souls! Hearken! See what I see! Hear what I hear! Feel what I feel! Jacob cries. Mortal love hears the grains of sand tapping in the hourglass, meting out wounds, closing off chances for repair and reconciliation in this life: The time speedily cometh! Ye bring your children unto destruction! Jacob cries. The tension of this restless, pained care and its limits is the price of a mortal love that chooses to be, and must be in some respects, powerless; powerless against the ravages of time, the opacity and agency of the other, and the relinquishment of coercion.
Anxiety, in this sense, is not a defect; it is the propulsive energy that drives us to worry, to pray, to act, to keep loving, again and again, even against our own fundamental inability to control the outcome. It can, if we are “pure in heart,” lead us to develop a “firmness of mind” that is the meeting ground of love and trust, action and non-action, power and restraint. From this place of equilibrium, Jacob promises that we can “lift up [our] heads and receive the pleasing word of God, and feast upon his love...forever,” “if [our] minds are firm” (Jacob 3:1-2).
Yet the temptation is always there to remedy our suffering and the suffering of others through brute power; sometimes, the power we want exercised is God’s. Jacob reassures himself that God is, as Isaiah says, the “Mighty one of Jacob,” of his forefather and his namesake (2 Nephi 6:18); he refers to God as the “all-powerful Creator” (Jacob 2:5), “Maker” (v. 6), the “Almighty God” with the “piercing eye” (v. 10). Contemplating the emotional and spiritual damage wreaked by the Nephites’ polygamy, pride, and greed, Jacob cries, “O, that he would show you that he can pierce you, and with one glance of his eye he can smite you to the dust!...O that ye would listen!” (v. 15-16, emphasis mine). Jacob keenly feels the temptation for God to, by sheer force, “rid [them] from [their] iniquity and abomination.” But this power, too, is a temptation God must forgo. (Fyodor Dostoevksy makes the most compelling literary case for why that is in the Brothers Karamzov’s “Grand Inquisitor").
And of course, there is the temptation to remedy the cost of our vulnerability, of sin’s injustices and wounds, by relying solely on our own power. In Jacob 4, for example, Jacob describes the many ways in which he and his fellow priests and teachers “labor diligently” to “engraven these words upon plates,” “keep the law of Moses,” “search the prophets” and seek “many revelations and the spirit of prophecy” in order to bring a knowledge of Christ to the Nephites (v. 3, 5, 6). These are all obviously good things that Jacob’s anxious love has prompted. “Nevertheless,” he pauses, “the Lord God showeth us our weakness that we may know that it is by his grace, and his great condescensions unto the children of men, that we have power to do these things” (v. 7). Recognizing both the frailty of our own power and the divine grace that inspires and nourishes our power can be liberating as well as humbling.
The temptation surfaces again at the end of the chapter: as Jacob yearns to “unfold” the “mystery” of Christ’s foundational salvific work to his people, he realizes he can only do so “if I do not, by any means, get shaken from my firmness in the Spirit, and stumble because of my over anxiety for you” (v. 18). “Over anxiety” is when we buckle under the vulnerability of our limitations, slipping from the equilibrium of anxious love and trusting faith into delusions of grandeur. To sustain our “firmness in Spirit” and in “mind,” we must steady ourselves, again and again, in a love without illusions. We must bear our love and our limitations without sacrificing one or the other.
If any word characterizes our age at the moment, I’d hazard “anxiety.” Perhaps Jacob’s rehabilitation of the dynamic tension between the driving energy of holy anxiety and the equanimity of a “firm mind” can empower us in our own struggles. Jacob’s anxiety harnesses the deeply human energies of love and limitation to embrace the vulnerability we cannot avoid and the grace that nourishes and steadies us, until we are ready to love, and love, again.