“I Stand All Amazed,” Tambuli, Apr. 1987, 28
I Stand All Amazed
One of our favorite hymns begins with the words “I stand all amazed.” (Hymns, no. 80.) As we think about Christ’s life, we are amazed in every way. We are amazed at his premortal role as the great Jehovah, agent of his Father, creator of the earth, guardian of the entire family of man. We are amazed at his coming to earth and the circumstances surrounding his advent. We are amazed at the miracle of his conception and the poverty of his birth.
We are amazed that at only twelve years of age he was already about his Father’s business. We are amazed at the formal beginning of his ministry, his baptism and spiritual gifts.
We are amazed that everywhere he went the forces of evil went before him and that they knew him from the beginning. We stand all amazed to know Jesus cast out and defeated these forces of evil even as he made the lame to walk, the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the infirm to stand. Indeed we are all amazed at every movement and moment—as every generation from Adam to the end of the world must be. When I consider the Savior’s ministry, I wonder, “How did he do it?”
But I am most amazed at the moment when Jesus, staggering under his load to the crest of Calvary, said, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34.)
If ever there is a moment when I indeed stand all amazed, it is this one. When I consider him bearing the weight of all our sins and forgiving those who would nail him to the cross, I ask not “How did he do it” but “Why did he do it?” As I examine my life against the mercifulness of His, I find how I fail to do as much as I should in following the Master.
For me, this is a higher order of amazement. I am startled enough by his ability to heal the sick and raise the dead, but I have had some experience with healing in a limited way. We are all lesser vessels, but we have seen the miracles of the Lord repeated in our own lives and in our own homes and with our own portion of the priesthood. But mercy? Forgiveness? Atonement? Reconciliation? Too often, that is a different matter.
How could he forgive his tormenters at that moment? With all that pain, with blood having fallen from every pore, still he was thinking of others. This is yet one more amazing evidence that he really was perfect and intends us to be also. In the Sermon on the Mount, before he stated that perfection is our goal, he gave something of a last requirement. He said all must “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” (Matt. 5:44.)
This is the most difficult thing of all to do. I would rather be asked to raise the dead or to restore sight or to steady a palsied hand. I’d rather do anything than to love my enemies and forgive those who hurt me or my children or my children’s children, and especially those who laugh and delight in the brutality of hurting others.
Jesus Christ was the purest and only perfect person who ever lived. He is the one person in all the world from Adam to this present hour who deserved adoration and respect and admiration and love, and yet he was persecuted, abandoned, and put to death. Through it all, he would not condemn those who persecuted him.
When our first parents, Adam and Eve, had been cast out of the Garden of Eden, the Lord commanded them to “worship the Lord their God, and … offer the firstlings of their flocks, for an offering unto the Lord.” (Moses 5:5.) The angel told Adam, “This thing is a similitude of the sacrifice of the Only Begotten of the Father, which is full of grace and truth.” (Moses 5:7.)
This sacrifice served as a constant reminder of the humiliation and suffering the Son would pay to ransom us. It was a constant reminder that he would open not his mouth, that he would be brought as a lamb to the slaughter. (See Mosiah 14:7.) It was a constant reminder of the meekness and mercy and gentleness—yes, the forgiveness—that was to mark every Christian life. For all these reasons and more, those firstborn lambs, clean and unblemished, perfect in every way, were offered on those stone altars year after year and generation after generation, pointing us toward the great Lamb of God, his Only Begotten Son, his Firstborn, perfect and without blemish.
In our dispensation, we are to partake of the sacrament—a symbolic offering that reflects our broken heart and contrite spirit. (See D&C 59:8.) As we partake, we promise to “always remember him and keep his commandments; … that [we] may always have his Spirit to be with [us].” (D&C 20:77.)
The symbols of the Lord’s sacrifice, in Adam’s day or our own, are to help us remember to live peacefully and obediently and mercifully. These ordinances are to help us remember to demonstrate the gospel of Jesus Christ in our long-suffering and human kindness one for another, as he demonstrated it for us on that cross.
But over the centuries, few of us have used these ordinances in the proper way. Cain was the first to offer an unacceptable sacrifice. As the Prophet Joseph Smith noted: “God … prepared a sacrifice in the gift of His own son who should be sent in due time, to prepare a way, or open a door through which man might enter into the Lord’s presence, whence he had been cast out for disobedience. … By faith in this atonement or plan of redemption, Abel offered to God a sacrifice that was accepted, which was the firstlings of the flock. Cain offered of the fruit of the ground, and was not accepted because he … could not exercise faith contrary to the plan of heaven. It must be shedding the blood of the Only Begotten to atone for man; for this was the plan of redemption; and without the shedding of blood was no remission; and as the sacrifice was instituted for a type, by which man was to discern the great Sacrifice which God had prepared; to offer a sacrifice contrary to that, no faith could be exercised, because redemption was not purchased in that way, nor the power of the atonement instituted after that order; … Certainly, the shedding of the blood of a beast could be beneficial to no man, except it was done in imitation, or as a type, or explanation of what was to be offered through the gift of God Himself; and this performance done with an eye looking forward in faith on the power of that great Sacrifice for a remission of sins.” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, selected by Joseph Fielding Smith, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1938, p. 58.)
And so others in our day, a little Cain-like, return home after partaking of the sacrament to argue with a family member or lie or cheat or be angry with a neighbor.
Samuel, prophet in Israel, commented on how futile it is to offer a sacrifice without honoring the meaning of the sacrifice. When Saul, king in Israel, had defied the Lord’s instructions by bringing back from the Amalekites “the best of the sheep and of the oxen, to sacrifice unto the Lord [his] God,” Samuel, in utter anguish cried: “Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.” (1 Sam. 15:15, 22.)
Saul offered sacrifice without comprehending the meaning of his sacrifice. Latter-day Saints who faithfully go to sacrament meeting but are no more merciful or patient or forgiving as a result, are much the same. They go through the motions of the ordinances without an understanding of the purposes for which these ordinances were established. Those purposes are to help us be obedient and gentle in our search for forgiveness of our sins.
Many years ago, Elder Melvin J. Ballard taught that “our God, is a jealous God—jealous lest we should [ever] ignore and forget and consider as unimportant His greatest gift unto us”—the life of his Firstborn Son. (Melvin J. Ballard, Crusader for Righteousness, Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1966, pp. 136–137.)
So how do we make sure that we never “ignore or slight or forget” his greatest of all gifts unto us?
We do so by showing our desire for a remission of our sins and our eternal gratitude for that most courageous of all prayers, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” We do so by joining in the work of forgiving sins.
“‘Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ,’ [Paul commands us]. (Gal. 6:2). … The law of Christ, which it is our duty to fulfil, is the bearing of the cross. My brother’s burden which I must bear is not only his outward situation [and circumstance], … but quite literally his sin. And the only way to bear that sin is by forgiving it. … Forgiveness is the Christlike suffering which it is the Christian’s duty to bear.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 2nd edition, New York: Macmillan, 1959, p. 100.)
Surely the reason Christ said “Father, forgive them” was because even in that terrible hour he knew that this was the message he had come through all eternity to deliver. The entire plan of salvation would have been lost had he forgotten that not inspite of injustice and brutality and unkindness and disobedience, but precisely because of them, he had come to extend forgiveness to the family of man. Anyone can be pleasant and patient and forgiving on a good day. A Christian has to be pleasant and patient and forgiving on all days.
Is there someone in your life who perhaps needs forgiveness? Is there someone in your home, someone in your family, someone in your neighborhood who has done an unjust or an unkind or an unchristian thing? All of us are guilty of such transgressions, so there surely must be someone who yet needs your forgiveness.
And please don’t ask if it is fair that the injured should have to bear the burden of forgiveness for the offender. Don’t ask if “justice” doesn’t demand that it be the other way around. No, whatever you do, don’t ask for justice. You and I know that what we plead for is mercy—and that is what we must be willing to give.
Can we see the tragic irony of not granting to others what we need so badly ourselves? Perhaps the highest and holiest and purest act would be to say in the face of unkindness and injustice that you do yet more truly “love your enemies and bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you, and persecute you.” That is the demanding pathway of perfection.
A marvelous Scottish minister once wrote:
“No man who will not forgive his neighbor, can believe that God is willing, yea wanting, to forgive him. … If God said, ‘I forgive you’ to a man who hated his brother, and if (although it would be impossible) that voice of forgiveness should reach the man, what would it mean to him? How would the man interpret it? Would it not mean to him, ‘You may continue to hate. I do not care. You have had great provocation and are justified in your hate’?
“No doubt God takes what wrong there is, and what provocation there is, into the account: but the more provocation, the more excuse that can be urged for the hate, the more reason … that the hater should [forgive, and] be delivered from the hell of his [anger].” (George MacDonald, An Anthology, edited by C. S. Lewis, New York: Macmillan, 1947, pp. 6–7.)
I recall just a few years ago seeing a drama enacted at the Salt Lake Airport. On this particular day, I got off an airplane and walked into the terminal. It was immediately obvious that a missionary was coming home because the airport was full of conspicuous-looking missionary friends and missionary relatives.
I tried to pick out the immediate family members. There was a father who did not look particularly comfortable in an awkward-fitting and slightly out-of-fashion suit. He seemed to be a man of the soil, with a suntan and large, work-scarred hands. His white shirt was a little frayed and was probably never worn except on Sunday.
There was a mother who was quite thin, looking as if she had worked very hard in her life. She had in her hand a handkerchief—and I think it must have been a linen handkerchief once but now it looked like tissue paper. It was nearly shredded from the anticipation only the mother of a returning missionary could know.
Two or three younger brothers and sisters were running around, largely oblivious to the scene that was unfolding.
I walked past them all and started for the front of the terminal. Then I thought to myself, “This is one of the special human dramas in our lives. Wait and enjoy it.” So I stopped. I moved to the back of the crowd to watch. The passengers were starting to come off the plane.
I found myself wondering as to who would be first to breakaway from the welcoming group. A look at the mother’s handkerchief convinced me that she would probably be the one.
As I sat there, I saw the returning missionary start to come down the stairs from the airplane. I knew he was the one by the squeals of excitement from the crowd. He looked like Captain Moroni, clean and handsome and straight and tall. Undoubtedly he had known the sacrifice this mission had meant to his father and mother, and it had made him exactly the missionary he appeared to be. He had his hair trimmed for the trip home, his suit was worn but clean, his slightly tattered raincoat was still protecting him from the chill his mother had so often warned him about.
He came to the bottom of the steps and started out toward the airport building and then, sure enough, somebody couldn’t wait any longer. It wasn’t the mother, and it wasn’t any of the children, or even the girlfriend standing nearby. It was father. That big, slightly awkward, quiet and bronzed giant of a man pushed his way past an airline attendant and ran out and swept his son into his arms.
The missionary was probably 6′2″ or so, but this big father grabbed him, lifted him off the ground, and held him for a long, long time. He just held him and said nothing. The boy dropped his briefcase, put both arms around his dad, and they just held each other very tightly. It seemed like all eternity stood still, and for a precious moment the Salt Lake City Airport was the center of the entire universe. It was as if all the world had gone silent out of respect for such a sacred moment.
And then I thought of God the Eternal Father watching his son go out to serve, to sacrifice when he didn’t have to do it, paying his own expenses, so to speak, costing everything he had saved all his life to give. At that precious moment, it was not too difficult to imagine that Father speaking with some emotion to those who could hear, “This is my Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” And it was also possible to imagine that triumphant returning son, saying, “It is finished. Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
Even in my limited imagination, I can see that reunion in the heavens. And I pray for one like it for you and for me. I pray for reconciliation and for forgiveness, for mercy, and for the Christian growth and Christian character we must develop if we are to enjoy such a moment fully.
I stand all amazed that even for a man like me, full of egotism and transgression and intolerance and impatience, there is a chance. But, if I’ve heard the “good news” correctly, there really is a chance—for me and for you and for everyone who is willing to keep hoping and to keep trying and to allow others the same privilege.
I marvel that he would descend from his throne divine
To rescue a soul so rebellious and proud as mine. …
I think of his hands pierced and bleeding to pay the debt!
Such mercy, such love, and devotion can I forget?
No, no, I will praise and adore at the mercy seat,
Until at the glorified throne I kneel at his feet. …
Oh, it is wonderful, wonderful to me!
(Hymns, no. 80.)
In the sacred name of Jesus Christ, amen.
The Last Supper by Carl Bloch. Original at the Chapel of Frederiksborg Castle, Denmark. Used by permission of the Frederiksborgmuseum.
Christ Healing the Blind Man by Carl Bloch. Original at the Chapel of Frederiksborg Castle, Denmark. Used by permission of the Frederiksborgmuseum.