Come, Follow Me December 2-8: Moroni 1-6
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.
Sharing the Sacrament with Moroni at the End of Time
By Rosalynde F. Welch
The book of Moroni is the only book in the Book of Mormon in which the phrase “it came to pass” is entirely absent. Perhaps that phrase seems trivial and its absence insignificant--though I think otherwise--but it at the very least it points to the unique character of the book of Moroni: Moroni’s own book, unlike every other division in the Book of Mormon, contains no historical narrative, aside from the briefest scene-setting at the beginning. A few other books, particularly 2 Nephi, Jacob, and Mormon, are light on history--but Moroni stands alone in its turn away from history and toward… well, what does it turn toward?
The book starts out with a clear purpose: Moroni is recording the prayer formulas for ordinances central to the saving work of the Church of Jesus Christ. He hopes that these “may be of worth unto my brethren, the Lamanites, in some future day, according to the will of the Lord” (Moroni 1:4)--when the Church has been restored in modern times, one assumes, though it’s not clear why these items are addressed to the Lamanites in particular. In chapter 6, Moroni speaks more generally about church governance, practices, and order. And then, in chapter 7, when he begins to share his father’s sermons and letters, readers start to wonder if there’s any single purpose to the book or if it’s just a grab bag of leftovers that had to be included somehow.
(Side note: even if Moroni were a scriptural grab bag--though I don’t think it is--we as readers should still read in search of an interpretive lens that makes meaningful sense of its order. There is no single or definitive way to do that, but the process of creating order and meaning out of a text--especially when we recognize that we are doing it, and doing it thoughtfully--is one of the ways that the Spirit can teach us as we meet together in the words of scripture. Engaging with scripture is an active, creative process, and collaborative thinking with a text is itself a sacred work.)
I do think there is a unifying theme that draws all of the book of Moroni into an urgently applicable message for the latter days. But before I tip my hand, let’s revisit the idea that Moroni turns away from history at the end of the Book of Mormon. That’s not quite right. Moroni does leave off historical narrative, but in many ways history is still very present in these chapters. After all, he makes it clear that the prayers and rituals of the ordinances he records are themselves historical. They are the very sacraments that were given by Christ to the Lehite church during his visit about four centuries previously: Moroni 2 opens with “The words of Christ, which he spake unto his disciples, the twelve whom he had chosen, as he laid his hands upon them.” They have been transmitted, either in a written record or in the lived practice of the Church, across the centuries and now will be preserved for the future.
This speaks to the way that religious rituals like the sacrament of the Lord’s supper, baptism, confirmation, and ordination create continuity through time among communities of believers. It’s not that variations in the words or the actions must never creep in: these practices can and do change over time, as we note in the fact that ordinations in the modern Church are not conducted in precisely the way specified in Moroni 3. But in a much richer way than exact reproduction, religion opens the door to the future by inviting the past into the present. According to the Catholic philosopher Bruno Latour, the essence of religion lies in the concept of "reprise," which means the act of taking up an existing tradition, re-interpreting it in the present day, and thereby reuniting a community with a renewed sense of purpose and ultimately holding open the possibility for the world to "go on."[1]
Ordinances and sacraments reprise the past in service of the future. This helps us understand why remembrance is so central to ordinances. Moroni labored to inscribe the sacrament prayers uttered by the Lehite church elders “according to the commandments of Christ.” As a result, each week during the sacrament, we “eat in remembrance of the body of thy Son” and witness that we “are willing to take upon [us] the name of thy Son, and always remember him” (Moroni 4:1, 3). The remembrance and remembering enjoined on us by the sacrament prayer is also a reprise: calling the past historical facts of Christ’s death and resurrection into a living reality in our present lives and in so doing, opening the door to the future.
President John Taylor expressed the way that ordinances open a channel for living grace to flow through events of the past into the present and future. He taught, “In partaking of the Sacrament we not only commemorate the death and sufferings of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, but we also shadow forth the time when he will come again and when we shall meet and eat bread with him in the kingdom of God.”[2] President Taylor here refers to the divine feast that is both a metaphor for and a promise of the communion we will experience at the second coming--with Christ and all those who are in Christ. This eschatological feast, the great banquet at the end of time, appears in teachings and images throughout scripture. Its picture of joyful, abundant feasting symbolizes both our covenant union with God and a cosmic reconciliation and renewal of creation. In a beautiful full-circle moment, the Lord gave Joseph Smith a prophetic glimpse of this culminating sacramental celebration and specifically noted that, among others, Moroni would be present--the very prophet who inscribed and preserved the Lehite sacrament prayers for the use of the restored Church. “The hour cometh,” the Lord told Joseph, “that I will drink of the fruit of the vine with you on the earth, and with Moroni, whom I have sent unto you to reveal the Book of Mormon, containing the fulness of my everlasting gospel” (D&C 27:5).
And to think that we foretaste this feast in a sip of water and a morsel of bread every week!
This brings me to what I believe is the unifying theme of the book of Moroni. In the chapters that follow these early ordinance-focused chapters--the sermon and letter of Mormon, and then Moroni’s final sign-off--we will get a sense for the chaos, evil, and catastrophe that these men experienced. It sounds distressingly familiar in light of the war, destruction, and catastrophe that has characterized the modern “times of the Gentiles” in which we live (D&C 45:28). That familiarity is intentional, because their question is also ours: How can I carry on in faith and hope and love, when unthinkable suffering and chaos rages all around me?
The answer lies, at least in part, in those sacred ordinances with which Moroni begins his book. Through the sacrament, through baptism, through the laying on of hands, we tap into a power that persists through the chaos of any particular historical moment. These rituals connect us to Christ's living presence across time through reprise, allowing us to participate in his redemptive work both past and future. When Moroni records these ordinances before descending into accounts of devastating wickedness and collapse, he is doing more than preserving religious procedures: he is offering a lifeline. These sacred rites serve as anchors of peace and channels of divine grace, allowing the faithful to carry on even when the world seems to be falling apart. Moroni's book isn't just a collection of ecclesiastical instructions and sobering letters. It's a manual for surviving spiritual catastrophe by remaining connected to the timeless power of Christ's atonement through his ordained sacraments.
[1] Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Harvard University Press, 2013), 306.
[2] John Taylor, Journal of Discourses, 14:185 (20 March 1870).
Images
Avard Tennyson Fairbanks, The Mortal Moroni, 1981. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [Bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/the-mortal-moroni/].
Ronald Crosby, [Moroni], c. 1962. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [Bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/moroni-15/].
Ben Crowder, Always Have His Spirit to Be With Them, 2021. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [Bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/always-have-his-spirit-to-be-with-them/].