What is it That Ye Shall Hope For?

What is it That Ye Shall Hope For?

1.       The Book of Mormon is at play with the ideas of life and death.

2.       This play does the serious theological work of relating death to hope, and tying hope to the resurrection. And making of the resurrection, grace.

3.       The hopeful dying are alive. And the hopeless living are dead.

4.       Several examples of persons who seem dead, but are actually alive, and others who are seem alive but are dead, populate the text.

5.       On the very edge of death himself, Lehi gathers his children to give his final blessing. In chapter 2, he repeatedly talks to his young and very much apparently alive sons about how they are, in fact, dead. He beseeches them to “arise from the dust” thrice, and tells them to “awake from the sleep [of death]” and “break the bands [of death]”.

6.       At the same time, Lehi, who is in the very act of dying, talks about himself as if he actually were ever living: “the Lord has redeemed my soul from hell…I have beheld His glory and am encircled about eternally in the arms of His love.”

7.       500 and some years later, Samuel the Lamanite says “all mankind, by the fall of Adam being cut off from the presence of the Lord, are considered as dead, both as to things temporal and to things spiritual [Helaman 14:16].” “Temporal” and “spiritual” must mean, at a minimum, “totally dead in all the ways one can be dead”.  “All mankind” equals a lot of people who think they are alive, but are, from the text’s perspective, somehow dead.

8.       Alma the Younger, the Lamanite King Lamoni are instances of people who seem dead but are really alive. The three Nephites are, too.  So is the Angel Moroni who brings the Book.

9.       Apparently, the Book of Mormon wants to problematize the seemingly straightforward ideas of what it is to live, and what it is to die.

10.   Observe that – with the exception of some divine miracle - the dead are those who cannot hope to live, because they are dead.

11.   Observe that – with the exception of some divine miracle- the living must die, and so they cannot hope to live either. At the very best, the living are merely dying.

12.   What is it that we, the dying, shall hope for?

13.   “Behold I say unto you that ye shall have hope through the atonement of Christ and the power of his resurrection, to be raised unto life eternal, and this because of your faith in him according to the promise [Moroni 7:41].”.

14.   We hope to be raised.

15.   We who are dying, we who are dead, are, by hope, oriented toward a life that is already gifted to us by God.  A “life of hope” is “death oriented toward the life of Christ”.

16.   Hope is dying in the light of the Resurrection, which means we are not dead, and cannot die.

17.   “Hopelessness” is living without the Resurrection; oriented toward the inexorability of death. It is “living death.”  It is life oriented toward death.

18.   The hopeless hope to save their lives and thereby lose them. The hopeful hope to lose their lives in Christ and thereby save them. He said that.

19.   The Resurrection must be a gift. Hope must be a gift. The dead cannot bring themselves to life.

20.   Therefore, the only thing that we, the dying, can give in order to receive the gift is to die.

21.   We, the hopeful dead, who are dying oriented toward the life of Christ, live by His gift. Our lives do not belong to us because we know we are dead.

22.   “Salvation” is the name of the life that is gifted to us when we die to ourselves.

23.    The only human act necessary to receive the gift is to be willing to receive it.

24.   That is to say, the only thing humans can offer God is to be willing to die. We only have our will. We only have our lives. We are only asked to give what we have.

25.   The Book of Mormon formulates thusly:

Jacob in 2 Nephi 10:24: “…reconcile yourselves to the will of God, and not to the will of the devil and the flesh; and remember, after ye are reconciled unto God, that it is only in and through the grace of God that ye are saved.”

Nephi, his brother, in 2 Nephi 25:23: “For we labor diligently to…persuade our children…to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.”

26.   Taken together (as they are surely intended to be) these statements remind us that “all we can do” is to be willing to be reconciled to the will of God.

27.   Our will is to surrender to God.

28.   His will is that we, though dead, receive life. That life is His gift. That life is grace.   

29.   And “all we” – the dead –“can do” is to be willing to die. Humans cannot “do” more than that. We can only give what we have: our lives and our will.

30.   Faith is to be willing.

31.   Therefore: we, the willing dead, are saved by faith through grace. We then live in hope of the Resurrection.  

32.   We, the hopeful dying, are alive.