[Jesus Prepares the People for Final Judgment Day]
[Sacrament Administered to the People]
[Sacrament Prayer Known Only in B of M]
Implications of the Sermon at the Temple
[B of M Given to Teach Us the New and Everlasting Covenant]
145 Today we’d like to finish up the last few elements in the Sermon at the Temple and then consider some of the implications of this approach to these chapters of scripture.
145 3 Nephi 15 :1 Of course, right after Jesus concludes the familiar material from the Matthean sermon, we begin in 3 Nephi 15 with a statement that puts all of this again back into perspective as to what it is doing. There Jesus says, “Whoso remembereth these sayings of mine and doeth them, him will I raise up at the last day.”
145 Again the point that we made at the outset was that one of the main purposes for this exercise, this instruction that Jesus is giving to the people, is to allow them to be able to be lifted up at the last day to withstand the final day of judgment. This general eschatological, judgmental orientation is then reinforced by what Jesus says. Notice also that just before you begin the Matthean material in the last part of chapter 11, you have the image of the person who builds upon the rock and the contrast with the person who builds upon the sand. That also comes then at the end in 3 Nephi 14, forming a kind of frame or an INCLUSIO, which is a device frequently used in ancient literature to help people to see what the orientation of a passage will be. So we have that double reference helping us all the more clearly to see this focus in the Sermon at the Temple.
145 Chapters 15 and 16 then move into what I would just term a lecture on the nature of the covenant. Here Jesus responds to some of the questions that people have. They’re not sure how it’s possible that the law of Moses, as we discussed in the first lecture, could be entirely fulfilled when there are still a number of outstanding prophecies and promises that obviously have not yet been completely satisfied. Jesus explains how that will be, how the law has been now transformed; but all of the promises that God has made, of course, are not yet materialized. They will be brought into effect both for Israel as a group and for individuals personally in due course.
145 3 Nephi 17:1 In point number 42, at the conclusion of that lecture, the beginning of chapter 17, Jesus then again turns his attention to instructing the people further as to what they should do. The first instruction, 3 Nephi 17:1, is that the people, if they are going to comprehend what he has said, must ponder, must go home and think about the things that have been said and done. I think that’s an important instruction that tells us that there are deep meanings in what Jesus has given—just as the temple for us is something that is never exhausted, that you must always ponder and think and pray about. So Jesus instructs his people that that’s what he wants them to do with this text. It’s not just a matter of doing, listening, and remembering, but also pondering and internalizing and thinking about very deeply.
145,146 3 Nephi 17:5-10 Item number 43: In 3 Nephi 17:5-9, Jesus then calls the people to bring any of the sick or afflicted that they might have so that Jesus can bless them. We have then the touching scene of Jesus blessing all of those in this multitude who had any affliction or handicap or any kind of illness. A comparable function, I suppose, is served in our own temples by the prayer roll, which is placed on the altar for any of the sick or afflicted or any people who need special blessings. It seems to me that Jesus turns to a similar function. It is interesting to me, although this is certainly not a part of any kind of ritual that would then be given by Jesus to the people, but they turn around and reciprocate to him with the washing of the feet—not with ordinary water, but they wash his feet in their tears because of the gratitude and the love that they have felt for him, having spent this day or whatever time it was with him.
146 3 Nephi 17:11-24 Point number 44: Jesus then turns to bless the parents and the children. We frequently hear of this material. It’s used in many Primary meetings and Primary inservice lessons to show how Jesus loves the children. We overlook, however, the first half of the blessing when we do that. The first thing Jesus does is to call the parents, and he blesses them. It’s interesting to me that there’s some discussion given, although we can’t be very sure of exactly how the people positioned themselves or where they were, but the text talks about these people being round about Jesus. Jesus is in the middle somehow, and he calls first of all the children to be brought to him. It seems to me that they would have, as children naturally do, just thronged around him—just encircled him in kind of an internal circle within the multitude. And then it says that the parents stood around the children, all round about them. So it’s almost as if you have Jesus in the middle with a circle of children around him, and then the parents encircling them. After Jesus blesses the parents, then he turns to the children and blesses each one of them. I think it’s significant that the text says, after he concludes this blessing, that he turns to the parents and says, “Behold your little ones.” It seems to me—and again I just suggest this for your pondering—that Jesus is doing something more here than simply saying: look at your little kids—aren’t they cute? Aren’t they cute little guys? He’s saying “behold your little ones.” In some sense now I think they are their little ones, in a sense that they weren’t prior to the time this blessing was given.
146 3 Nephi 17:24,25 At that point you remember that the parents witness what has gone on. Angels descend and minister, and thus this portion of the Sermon at the Temple is witnessed by God, angels, and the parents as witnesses. The suggestion, of course, is that some form of priesthood blessing has been given which now brings these families together in a special, spiritual way. They would never be the same as families, in any event, having experienced this great event together as a family unit.
146 3 Nephi 18:6-12 In chapter 18 we turn then to point 45, where Jesus will give the people a new name. The new name that they are given is the name of Christ, which they take upon themselves by way of covenant. It’s interesting that we now encounter the Eucharist, the sacrament, where Jesus divides the congregation into the groups and has the disciples minister unto them, giving them each the bread and the wine as tokens of his body and blood. In so doing, as they partake of that, they covenant and witness that they will keep the commandments which he had given them this day. We usually think of the sacramental covenant only in connection with our baptismal covenants. But as I understand it, when we partake of the sacrament every Sunday, we renew whatever covenant we have ever made with God, and so it is the full range of covenant relationship that’s being renewed and enriched and represented by that.
146 I’d like to digress for just a minute to talk about the sacrament because I think it bears on the general question of whether or not it is reasonable to think that the Nephites took what they experienced on this day and incorporated it somehow into their religious liturgy and ritual. I think one of the strongest evidences of that is in the sacrament prayers. If you compare, and a few people have done this, 3 Nephi 18, where Jesus administers to the bread and then administers to the wine, the words and phrases which Jesus uses there all find their way into the sacrament prayer that you find in Moroni 4 and 5—that they will take upon them the name of Christ and always remember him. In 3 Nephi 18 it’s all cast in the first person. Jesus, of course, is saying that you will keep the commandments which I have given you, that you will always remember the body which I have shown unto you. Someone has taken this—whether it was Nephi himself or whether it was Jesus himself, we don’t know—but someone has taken this experience and then cast those words and phrases into the prayer that the Nephites I think immediately begin using as their sacrament prayers.
146,147 It is interesting to me that as Latter-day Saints we do not technically observe the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. The prayers that we administer, the sacrament that we participate in, is really the sacrament of the Lord’s appearance, because it is from the Book of Mormon that we know those prayers. We don’t know those from the New Testament or from anything in early Christianity. The way in which the priests administer the sacrament is explained in the Book of Mormon and follows this prototype. What that says to me is that we generally spend our time during preparation for partaking of the sacrament thinking [of New Testament scenes], and this is certainly appropriate. I don’t mean to take away; I mean simply to augment. We usually think of the Last Supper, the Upper Room—the events that preceded the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. It seems to me that we should add to that an effort to try to spiritually place ourselves into the context of the Sermon at the Temple—that we should try to see ourselves as having experienced the same thing that these Nephites did. It is their prayer that we use.
147,148 3 Nephi 18:7 There is a little difference that I think you might also want to observe between the Old World and the New World. For those who see this as the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, the prayer (and Paul reflects this) on the bread was always “eat in remembrance of the body which was broken.” It is the broken bread, the symbol of the breaking there that becomes important for the Old World.] But in 3 Nephi 18:7 what does the bread symbolize in the memory of the Nephites? You should; partake of the bread in memory of the body which I have shown unto you. The Nephites didn’t see the breaking [of Christ’s body] as John and James and Peter did, and Mary and Martha and those who were there at the cross. For them it was a symbol of the resurrection—the life, the blood, the bread of life—a little different orientation.
148 You might also want just to note and put this in the hopper to think about as well: Although we don’t celebrate the sacrament today in our temples, in the Kirtland Temple and in the Nauvoo Temple that was standard. In fact, as a part of the dedicatory service for the Kirtland Temple, after Sidney Rigdon finally got through with his two-and-a-half-hour sermon (Sidney was into long sermons), they broke for the afternoon and came back. Then following the dedicatory prayer and a number of testimonies and speaking in tongues and so on, then the twelve apostles administered the sacrament to all who were present. That was also done in the Nauvoo Temple.
148 3 Nephi 18:28-30 We move then to point number 46. After the sacrament is administered, Jesus then gives the people instruction about the importance of continuing worthiness: that no one is to be allowed to participate in the sacrament—and by that I would understand all of the ordinances and instructions leading up to and a part of the partaking of the sacrament. Everything that Jesus has done, whatever is going to be continued of this—no one is to be allowed to participate in these from this point forward unless they are proven worthy to do so. Something along the order of a temple recommend is perhaps suggested here, that priesthood authorities are not knowingly to allow people to participate in these ordinances unless they are worthy to do so.
148 3 Nephi 18:36,37 Finally, the last thing that Jesus does before he ascends that evening is number 47 at the end of chapter 18. He lays his hands upon the twelve whom he has chosen and gives them the power to bestow the gift of the Holy Ghost. I think that’s an interesting thing to observe. Jesus, of course, had called them as twelve in chapter 11, but if you look carefully, the text is very precise and says that at that point, Jesus gave them only the power to baptize. That of course is the Aaronic Priesthood or the Levitical Priesthood, or something equivalent in the Nephite jargon. But by the time they have completed this day, they are now prepared to take upon themselves the Melchizedek Priesthood. So there’s something that has happened between chapters 11 and 18 that I think is significant from a priesthood advancement point of view, and I think that too fits very nicely into what we have been suggesting as the essence of this experience altogether.
148 So with that the remarkable first day of Jesus with the Nephites concludes. You can imagine going home that night and indeed having been fed and impressed. When Jesus says go home and think about this, there’s certainly a lot to think about. Can you imagine having just had this all thrown at you? You remember when you went to the temple or when you were baptized or whatever it was. It doesn’t all sink in right at first; it takes a while. And you can just imagine how these people would have felt after not just a first discussion or a second discussion, but basically getting the whole banquet in one sitting. Really rather staggering.
150 I think that the accounts we have of how the translation took place support the ideal that what we have here is in fact a more literal representation of what was actually on the plates than just some kind of nebulous, general interpretation. David Whitmer said that in the translation process a character would appear to Joseph, and then he would give the translation. It’s interesting! to me that he says that sometimes in that translation process, one character would end up being a whole sentence. Other times a character would only represent a word. In other words, we wouldn’t expect to find a one-to-one correlation between what is in the English translation and the symbols on the plates. But everything that is translated into English has some equivalent, whether it is a symbolic or more of a literary kind of equivalent, it was, at least in David Whitmer’s mind, something that was coming from the plates and not just being incorporated in from the rest of Joseph’s memory of scripture.
150 The Sermon on the Mount in the Joseph Smith Translation is not exactly the same as the Sermon on the Mount in the Book of Mormon. I account for that because the JST makes it clear that Jesus is giving that instruction at that time. The way you have it in the JST is at the very’ beginning of his ministry when he first calls the Twelve and sends them on a mission. It is being used in a missionary context there. I conclude from that that Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount more than once. The basic text remained the same, but certain portions of it could be changed to adapt it to the various audiences or the needs or circumstances. I think he gave it when he called the apostles and sent them out—when they needed to have power in order to act in his name. I think he gave it to them again after the resurrection and before he left in Luke 24. I don’t know how many times he gave it. One of the premises of New Testament scholarship is that Jesus said everything only once, and therefore our chore as scholars is to try to plow back into the text and find what the original form of the saying was. When you compare, for example, the prayer in Luke 11 with the prayer in Matthew 6, or the Beatitudes in Luke 6 with the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 [you see this]. The task that the critical New Testament scholars have taken upon themselves is to find what the original form of those Beatitudes must have been. That assumes that there was only one set of Beatitudes and that Jesus only blessed people once and that Jesus only taught people how to pray once. I guess I just find that really hard to believe. He worked for three years. Any of you who have preached the gospel for a couple of years know that you give the same discussion more than once. And it’s not always exactly the same.
150,151 Before we leave this point of translation, let me make just a couple of other points. There’s an interesting thing you should know a little about. Well, let me give you this example and then explain some of the others. In Matthew 5:21-22 there’s the saying, “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill. . . . But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother . . . shall be in danger.” Now in your King James version you read, for “whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause,” Okay? In other words, if you’ve got a good cause, then you’re okay. But if you are angry with your brother without a good reason, then you are in danger of the council and the judgment. Now that phrase, without a cause, is this little Greek word EIKE, and it’s kind of hard to translate exactly what it means literally, but likely or something like that. Now, [you notice an] interesting thing when you go to the earliest manuscripts, several of them—[such as] P64 and P67. This New Testament manuscript dates to around A.D. 200, among the earliest New Testament manuscripts we have. Also [there is] the original hand of the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the better of the New Testament codices, and several other minuscules and other early Christian Fathers. When they present this material, they drop this word. I mean they don’t drop it—it’s just not there. So it just says whoever is angry is in trouble.
151 Now you look at 3 Nephi 12, and you’ll see that the phrase “without a cause” is not there. New Testament scholars have concluded that this is probably the original, the better reading, to drop this, because Jesus rarely gave people excuses or escape hatches. He doesn’t say, whosoever looks upon a woman to lust after her with good cause is okay. No. The harder sayings of Jesus are the ones that are usually consistent with the rest of his preaching. So here we have one place in the Book of Mormon where the New Testament manuscripts make a difference in the meaning of how we understand what Jesus is saying, and the Book of Mormon conforms with what appears to me, and I think most would agree, to be the stronger reading.
151 There’s another one like that in 3 Nephi 12:10. In Matthew it says for whosoever shall suffer persecution and so on for righteousness’s sake shall be blessed. Now as people have tried to translate the Sermon on the Mount in Greek back into the Aramaic that Jesus might have spoken, that is a very difficult expression to put back into Aramaic. A very strong and cogent argument has been made that Jesus didn’t say that we should suffer for righteousness’s sake, but that in Aramaic that most likely would have been “whosoever will suffer for the Righteous One’s sake.” In other words you’re suffering for whom? For God. He is the Righteous One. The Book of Mormon is consistent with that where it says that you will suffer for my name’s sake. It is the Lord that is behind that.
151 Now there are about ten other significant places in the Greek manuscripts where it appears that there were some differences in the early manuscripts. They’re significant from a very technical kind of textual point of view, but they don’t, in my opinion, result in any difference in the meaning of the passage. In other words, in some places the Greek will say “whoever is angry with his brother.” In other places it will say “whosoever is angry with his brother,” and some places will just say “who is angry with his brother.” Well, there we have some textual confusion. Was it who, whoever, or whosoever? But does it matter in English how you render it? I can render that any one of those three ways into English and then ask you to tell me which of those three in Greek it originally was and you can’t tell. You could render all three of those Greek expressions with the same whosoever in English. And that’s the case, I believe, in all of those other places where we have variants. The one place where it does make a difference, the Book of Mormon delivers the needed translation. I think there are a lot of stories in the Book of Mormon that can be interpreted in that same sense with covenants and temple symbols.
151 Now that we know that they were seeing the fulfillment of the old practices in this new, and also knowing how important temple ritual was in ancient Israel, we can start looking at places like 2 Nephi 6-10 which is a covenant speech that Nephi wants Jacob to deliver to the people. We can now look at Mosiah 1-6 with a new set of eyes, which of course has a lot of similarities [to the covenant text in 3 Nephi]. The covenant language in Mosiah 5 is directly related to the language that we have in 3 Nephi 18. All of the promises—taking upon yourself a new name, promising to remember him always and keep his commandments which he has given you—those phrases are right there in Mosiah 5. Also look at Alma 12 and 13, where Alma is describing a manner in which priests after the Order of the Son of God are ordained, a manner in which they can look forward to the atonement of Christ. It’s a symbolic type of ordinance, more going on there than just a simple ordination by the laying on of hands.
152 D&C 42 was known as the law—these are the rules by which all people who participate in the new and everlasting covenant are bound, and notice the similarities there again to the Ten Commandments and basic teachings that are present in all of these texts.
152 D&C 84:57 One of the theme songs, of course, of President Benson’s administration has been that we still labor under a condemnation because we have not remembered “the new covenant, even the Book of Mormon.” Look at the phrase there in the D&C 84:57. The problem is not that we have forgotten the Book of Mormon. The problem is not that we don’t know the story of the stripling warriors, etc. The problem is not that we don’t have Arnold Friberg paintings etched in our minds. You know, we remember the Book of Mormon in those kinds of ways, but what the Doctrine and Covenants tells us that we must remember is “the new covenant, even the Book of Mormon.” Of course, one of its purposes is that we might know the covenants and know that we are not cast off. That’s right on the title page, so perhaps we need to attend much more to the understanding of the covenant relationship that the Book of Mormon is trying to create between us and our Father in Heaven and Christ. All of these kinds of texts work into that objective.
152 It seems to me that when you have a Socrates, a Jesus, a Buddha, whoever it is that stands as the fountainhead of a powerful new religious movement or ideology or philosophical school, it is rarely the followers who come traipsing along behind, especially when they are fishermen, who somehow impose upon these miscellaneous sayings a coherent order. Somehow we have this view, and maybe it’s created by something of an enamorment with evolution, that things always start out simple and then get complex; therefore, Jesus’ gospel must have started out with simple sayings and then the complex structures were added ecclesiastically after the community was somehow formed. It seems to me that that isn’t necessarily the way we ought to view this. It’s more likely to me that the powerful historical fact of Jesus has to be understood in conjunction with his being the source of not just a few aphorisms or proverbs, but an entire world view that is put together in a coherent whole. It seems to me that that’s a more likely interpretation and that the reasons offered by textual critics to the contrary are interesting and teach me to read the text very carefully, but they don’t explain what I see going on here.
153 The New Testament scholars are moving away from the radical idea that I’ve presented here that Matthew somehow just pulled this all together. There are too many things in the Sermon on the Mount, even as we have it, that are inconsistent with the agenda that Matthew seems to be imposing on the text in other places where you can see that he’s doing it. And just vocabulary. I can’t remember off the top of my head, but I’ve looked at the vocabulary in the Sermon on the Mount, and there are an astonishingly high number of words in the Sermon on the Mount that are used only in the Sermon on the Mount and never again in anything that Matthew writes and rarely in anything else in the New Testament. It bears the characteristics of a pre-Matthean text that Matthew didn’t write. Surely he incorporated it into his record, but I can’t imagine Matthew pawning off in A.D. 70 a gospel and saying, here, this is what Jesus said to us on the mountain. You remember? Hey, there were people who were still around who remembered, and they would have said, gee, I don’t remember Jesus ever saying that. And how’s this going to be bought? How’s this going to be pawned off on people? Their memories were not that short. Besides that, there are too many evidences that the Sermon served a role in the late thirties and early forties in the ward or branch or community in Jerusalem—it’s actually called a synagogue still in the epistle of James. And it was used according to the best scholarly opinion right now as a cultic reminder of the covenants that people made when they joined the Christian church. So it served a role that indicates that it would have been a text known and kept and not just created late in the day.
153 There’s another thing in terms of apostasy if you look back again and reread 1 Nephi 13 where Nephi prophesies about the loss of plain and precious things. At large in the land generally among Latter-day Saints is the idea that what happened was that plain and precious things were taken away from the record. First of all, somebody came along and with some scissors excised things that were plain and precious. That’s not what Nephi says if you read the order in which he presents the apostasy and the process by which it occurred. First, he says, that they will take away plain and precious parts from the gospel. And next, they will take away the covenants of the Lord. And third, as a result, plain and precious parts will be left out of the record. The process is first a change in the understanding of the gospel. Once the gospel is changed, they don’t understand how to use or have the power to administer the covenants. Once those things are gone, then [in] the later collections of records [they] have a hard time understanding or explaining, perhaps omitting certain things that they just aren’t doing anymore. The cause is not a textual problem; it’s not a transmission or a scribal problem. In fact I think in many cases the plain and precious things can still be right there in the record. But if the knowledge has been taken away from the gospel, and if the understanding of the priesthood and the covenants are gone, then you can read exactly the same words and just understand it in a completely different light. The result is exactly the same either way.