Come, Follow Me October 28-November 3: The Day of Grace
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.
The Day of Grace
By Kimberly Matheson
If we’re being honest, Mormon’s record is a pretty depressing read. Mormon himself is a refugee of war as a young child, tasked with adult responsibilities at only ten years old, thrust onto the front lines of military conflict as a teenager, subject to a failed ministry, and witness to the end of the Nephites at their most depraved and immoral. Through his eyes, we watch as families and nations flee for their lives, clinging desperately to possessions that slip away, turning resentful toward heaven and despairing about the lives that are also slipping from their grasp. If ever there were a book of scripture through which we might think about sorrow, it would be this one.
Reflecting on the kind of sorrow he witnesses among his people, Mormon has this to say:
Their sorrowing was not unto repentance because of the goodness of God, but it was rather the sorrowing of the damned because the Lord would not always suffer them to take happiness in sin.
Mormon here describes two different kinds of sorrow, attached to two different kinds of cause. On the one hand, the possibility of repentance exists “because of the goodness of God” while, in actual fact, the people persist in despair “because the Lord would not always suffer them to take happiness in sin.” The two clauses share other parallels, as well: in each case, the word “because” separates a prepositional phrase from an independent clause. The prepositional phrase is introduced both times with the word “of” (“of the goodness of God,” “of the damned”) while the independent clause turns on some version of the verb “to be” (“was not unto repentance,” “would not always suffer”). But what’s most interesting, here, is that the locations of the independent clause and prepositional phrase are reversed. In the first kind of sorrow, the independent clause (“was not unto repentance”) comes before the word “because” while the prepositional phrase (“of the goodness of God”) comes after. But in the second instance, this is swapped: the independent clause (“would not always suffer”) comes after the “because” while the prepositional phrase (“of the damned”) comes before.
That’s a lot of grammatical minutiae for a blog post, I realize, but it teaches me something this week about the kind of sorrow that leads us to God.
Prepositional phrases and independent clauses serve very different grammatical functions. In large part, this is because independent clauses contain verbs (this is what makes them clauses in the first place) whereas prepositional phrases do not. And because verbs are action words, independent clauses can describe change and motion and transformation. Prepositional phrases, by contrast, are static descriptors. They add specificity and precision, but they can’t do much with time and motion because they don’t contain verbs.
So if something is described by an independent clause, the grammar conveys a sense of change or action. If it’s described by a prepositional phrase, the grammar conveys a constant or static feel.
To see why any of this matters, we need to look more closely at the first kind of “sorrow” that Mormon describes—the sorrow that he wished his people would exhibit: “their sorrowing,” he writes, “was not unto repentance because of the goodness of God.” Mormon wishes that his people’s sorrow would lead them somewhere—that it would generate something transformative and dynamic, as signaled by the independent clause. He hopes that their sorrow might lead them to something verbal, namely, repentance. He feels justified in this hope “because of the goodness of God.” Because God has a certain unchanging quality (the “goodness” signaled by the static prepositional phrase), Mormon knows that “sorrow” can turn to “repentance.” Relying on the invariable goodness of God and knowing that what must bend and change, then, is on our end of the ledger, sorrow becomes an occasion to repent.
Among Mormon’s people, however, the actual situation is quite different from his wish. Instead of leading to something dynamic and transformative, his people’s sorrow is entrenched and unchanging: it is the sorrowing “of the damned.” Grammatically speaking, they have become static, in part because they attribute a capricious changeability to God. From their positions of rigid despair, they can see only that “the Lord would not always suffer them to take happiness in sin.” Because God, on this view, is seen to have a certain verbal dynamism—the caprice to (from their perspective) suddenly take away their pleasures, the people double down, calcifying their hearts through resentment until they are unable to transform. They are now, simply, “the damned.”
In the sorrow of true repentance, we change by turning toward God, whose love is constant. In the sorrow of unrepentant sin, God appears to change by turning our sin against us, while we remain constant in our resentment.
We are all familiar with the Lord’s counsel to have “a broken heart and a contrite spirit” (2 Ne 2:7) but Mormon here provides a fuller context and consequence for those attributes. Having a soft and repentant heart turns out to be just one side of our relationship with God. Someone in this relationship will be changeable and someone will not; either the Lord or we ourselves will turn out to be fixed in our attributes. But when we refuse to be the changeable party, we find ourselves among the stagnant bitterness of the damned. It is only when we are humble enough to repent that God’s constancy can come into view.
If we refuse to grant any change on our side of the ledger, God can only appear to us as erratic and unreliable. But where we are willing to change, to break our hearts and come with contrition before Him, we will find on the other side God’s goodness unchanging.
IMAGES
Apryl Stott, [The Book of Mormon], 2018. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [bookofmormonartcatalog.org/the-book-of-mormon/].
Jayden Itejere, The Land of Desolation, 2023. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [bookofmormonartcatalog.org/the-land-of-desolation/].
Scott McGregor Snow, Mormon, Age 10. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [bookofmormonartcatalog.org/mormon-age-10/].