Come, Follow Me December 9-15: Moroni 7-9
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.
Without Love, Ye Are Nothing
By Morgan Davis
The Book of Moroni is the only book within the Book of Mormon whose original 1830 chapter breaks have all been retained in our modern editions. I suspect the reason is that, for the most part, Moroni’s chapters were already short to begin with.[1] And that is because, as becomes obvious to any reader, the Book of Moroni is not so much a narrative as a miscellany of information being assembled as if for a time capsule during the final desperate days of Nephite civilization. Like the sword of Laban, the Liahona, and a breastplate that were buried with the record, these chapters are artifacts, postcards from the end of a world. There is an opening postscript followed by notes on various rites, including how they used to baptize, bless the sacrament, and conduct the services of the church. A sermon of a father as remembered by his son. A letter from that father. Another letter. A post-postscript, and the last Amen.
Amidst all the darkness—and there is none deeper in the whole Book of Mormon than the depravity detailed in chapter 9—lies Mormon’s luminous sermon on faith, hope, and charity; on the meekness that activates all three; and on the necessity of miracles, which Moroni preserves for us in chapter 7.
The phrases that leap at me as I review these chapters today are two that seem at home with the end of the world:
Ye are nothing.
And
All things must fail—
Standing on their own, these are desolating words that would rhyme with the most pessimistic assessments of nature and human nature in the library: William Butler Yeats’s “Things fall apart,” science’s law of entropy, Robert Frost’s “Nothing gold can stay,”and Freddie Mercury’s “Nothing really matters,” to name just a few famous examples. But of course, these phrases do not stand alone. Watch the transformation that happens when we add back their immediate contexts from Mormon’s discourse (Moroni 7.46):
Charity never faileth: Wherefore, cleave unto charity, for all things must fail— But charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him.
And
Wherefore my beloved brethren, if ye have not charity, ye are nothing.
Mormon’s meaning is unambiguous. Issued from the ashes of a disaster that makes his point with terrible eloquence, he wants us to know that without love, we are done for. Without love, none of it matters, and everything is dust. If the Book of Mormon is the keystone of our religion, we have the keystone of God’s saving plan. It begins and ends and is sustained at every point in between with love—in particular, the love of God that is manifest in the life, atoning sacrifice, and grace of Christ.
That phrase “ye are nothing” sets up a resonance with King Benjamin’s ancient admonition to “always retain in remembrance the greatness of God and your own nothingness, and his goodness and long-suffering towards you unworthy creatures” (Mosiah 4.11, punctuation adjusted). Remembering always our nothingness tempers our expectations should we come to possess some measure of charity: If we have not charity, we are nothing; but the inverse does not follow that if we do come by some charity we are suddenly somehow everything. Rather, if we have charity, we may become something, but what that something turns out to be remains for God to reveal by his grace. Mormon’s allusive language here points us to an affine meditation in the New Testament: “Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God…” (1 John 3.1). Having been recipients of this love, and even being called, as King Benjamin affirmed, “His sons and his daughters,” yet it still “doth not yet appear what we shall be” (1 John 3.2). The mystery of what those who love are becoming is bound intimately with the mystery of God himself. But of this Mormon assures us: If we learn the ways of love, then when at last “he shall appear, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (Moroni 7.48, punctuation adjusted).[2]
If, in the end, we haven’t at least begun to learn how to love, it will not matter what we learned or earned instead. Reflecting on these themes, David Holland has written: “After all the many millennial preparations we undertake as a people—from stockpiling food to reading the signs of the times—it turns out that the essential prerequisite for being well in the last day boils down to one true thing: the love of Jesus Christ.”[3]
Fortunately, there is a very, very low bar for our entry upon the learner’s path of love. In fact, the bar is in the dust, and we find it when we, sooner or later, recognize truly our nothingness and insufficiency. It is in our emptiness and sorrow that we first make any meaningful acquaintance with Christ. We find him hiding in plain sight, waiting for us to show up with the only token required for admission into his company: a broken heart.
Recently, we have welcomed John Newton’s timeless hymn, “Amazing Grace,” back into our worship singing. Surely the reason that hymn is so beloved is it expresses with simple eloquence the feeling of being at that low, broken, and empty place, of being lost, blind, and wretched, but then found, healed, and saved. Grace is nothing less than a name for the gift of God’s love, which, Mormon testifies, must be our pattern. As David Holland has put it so well,
When divine love flows through us, we begin to “see him as he is”; that is, having experienced for someone else a taste of the love God has for us, we have come to understand his character more fully. In that process, we have also begun “to become like him,” increasingly definable by his defining quality. Both our faith in who he is and our hope for who we can be are fulfilled in pure love.[4]
[1] The first edition of the Book of Mormon featured much longer chapters than we have today for most of the books in the record. The chapter divisions that are familiar to us were introduced by Orson Pratt in the 1879 edition of the Book of Mormon.
[2] Mormon’s promise resonates with the reflection on love in 1 John 3 without being dependent on it, for whereas the author of 1 John says “every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure” (1 John 3.3), Mormon is more precise; he doesn’t suggest that we may purify ourselves, but instead offers a hope “that we may be purified even as he is pure” (Moroni 7.48). Like every good thing, the purification we seek is a gift of grace that we cannot command, only receive in gratitude.
[3] David F. Holland, Moroni: A Brief Theological Introduction (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2020), 96.
[4] Holland, Moroni, 98.
Images
Benton Blonde, I Bid Unto All Farewell, 2024. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [bookofmormonartcatalog.org/i-bid-unto-all-farewell/].
Rose Datoc Dall, Clarion Call, 2010. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/clarion-call/].
Minerva Teichert, Moroni: the Last Nephite, 1949-1951. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/moroni-the-last-nephite/].