Here is one of my favorite parts of the Book of Mormon. Well, OK. There is a certain theme here that you don't don't find in many other places in the scriptures, and this is the first instance of it: complaining. Sariah believes that all four of her sons have died in Jerusalem, and she does what any normal person would do in the same situation: she gets upset! What a breath of fresh air! Some people use this as an excuse to revere Sariah less than other women in the scriptures, but it makes me love her more. She gets dealt a seemingly lousy hand, she complains, then repents. Flaws were indeed part of the Biblical character make-up. Which means I'm not entirely lost.
An interesting aside to this: when Lehi tries to comfort Sariah and reel her back into righteousness, so to speak, he tells her "I have obtained a land of promise, in the which thing I do rejoice." Say what? They haven't obtained any promised land yet that I know of. But his use of the present tense makes me wonder: to tell well-organized mind, is a promised blessing as good as an actual blessing? If I have been promised an eternal marriage, should that be just as satisfying to me as if I were already married? If so, I am in big, big, huge trouble. Really, though, I think he has the right idea. God is a s good as His word as long as we keep our end of the bargain: to continually move towards perfection. Piece of cake. All the blessings He has promised will be fulfilled, equals, almost as good as having them.
To my mortal mind, this makes no sense: the promise of cake is not nearly as delicious as a real piece of real cake. The anticipation of said cake may make the cake eventually taste better, but that still implies reception of the cake. I would not be happy to have anticipation forever unfulfilled. I guess that's just the mortal in me.
The rest of the chapter talks about the brass plates and why they were so great. So worth going back for. First five books of Moses. Pretty important, especially if one is still subject to that tricky Law of Moses. Genealogy. A man after my own heart, Lehi is thrilled to learn he is a descendant of Joseph. So was Laban, which proves that it takes all kinds to make a PAF chart. This knowledge sparks Lehi to prophesy about his seed, and the important role the brass plates would play in his posterity's lives. Beautiful stuff.
I wonder if, as Lehi rejoiced in the future fulfillment of positive prophesies, he likewise mourned in the doleful prophesies about his seed, as much as if it had already happened?
1 comment:
Nice catch on Lehi's present tense. The promise of blessings is only as good as your faith in the promise (Ether 12:4 is a nice description of this). I also love that Lehi adopts Sariah's word "visionary," and completely reverses its intended meaning. There's a lot of overlap between the worldly concept of a deranged visionary and the faithful concept of an inspired visionary.
Great point about Sariah. It's tempting to see this as a dig at her, to be critical because she complained. But unlike Laman and Lemuel, Sariah wasn't complaining that things were getting difficult. She was complaining that her family was dying. This is a far nobler reason to doubt than Laman and Lemuel's, and she shows her good character by repenting when her sons arrive safely. In verse 8 she commits herself to journeying to the promised land with a powerful testimony.
I still find genealogy's role in all of this somewhat perplexing. I always felt like where we come from is irrelevant to what we ought to do. So what if my grandpa was Gandhi or if he was Hitler? Don't we all have to live the same commandments? But this chapter leaves little room for doubt that our family identity matters. Perhaps it's because complete families are our goal in the Gospel, because the promised land we are heading toward means nothing without the family relationships that we will have there. After all, how excited can you really get about living in the kingdom of God if all the kingdom of God means is impersonal commandment-keeping.
And perhaps families are important because they are central to our identity. We understand ourselves by reference to our relationships and our history. An a-historical identity is flat and empty. What does life mean without a sense of where we come from, how we fit in to life now, and where we are headed. Lehi's genealogy plugged his family in a much greater story, an inspiring tradition that stretched long into the past, and, as Lehi prophesied, would stretch long into the future.
I've always puzzled about how prophecies of their civilization's doom affected the Nephites. Clearly quite a few of them knew it. Samuel the Lamanite prophesies that if the Nephites don't repent they'll be destroyed in 400 years as I recall. Which always seemed dumb to me. What kind of a threat is that? Oh no! Centuries after we're dead God will come and smite our descendents! It just doesn't seem that motivating. People can't even motivate themselves to avoid that cheeseburger that will cause their death in 40 years, let alone change their wicked lifestyle for something an order of magnitude more distant. But anyway, I guess they must just have had their sorrow swallowed up in knowledge of the gathering of Israel.
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