Will Ye Also Go Away?

This morning I listened to Elder Ballard’s talk To Whom Shall We Go? from last general conference.  He spoke about the Savior’s words at the synagogue in Capernaum recorded in John 6 and how many disciples after that “walked no more with him.”  Seeing this, Christ asked the apostles this penetrating question: “Will ye also go away?” (John 6:66-67)  Elder Ballard commented on this exchange in these words: “For some, Christ’s invitation to believe and remain continues to be hard—or difficult to accept.  Some disciples struggle to understand a specific Church policy or teaching.  Others find concerns in our history or in the imperfections of some members and leaders, past and present….  In the end, each one of us must respond to the Savior’s question: ‘Will ye also go away?’  We all have to search for our own answer to that question.”  Certainly one of those issues that people have concerns with from our history is that of plural marriage.  It can be very difficult to understand why such a foreign and repulsive practice to us would have been commanded by the Lord and to believe that it really was God who required it. 

                I read this morning this article from the Church on plural marriage in the early days of the Church.  My general feeling after digesting this was the same feeling I had many years ago after reading Gerald Lund’s Work and the Glory series about the early Saints.  While I don’t remember the details of the novels, I do remember coming away with the sense that plural marriage was a great trial for the faithful early Saints.  It was their Abrahamic test that the Lord placed upon some of them, and it was a very hard thing for all who accepted it, including Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.  That is again my takeaway from this summary.  According to the article Joseph was commanded by an angel three times to start practicing this principle and “during the third and final appearance, the angel came with a drawn sword, threatening Joseph with destruction unless he went forward and obeyed the commandment fully.”  Joseph did not want to implement the practice and it was, it appears, a great struggle for him.  Brigham Young’s first response when learning about plural marriage said, “It was the first time in my life that I had desired the grave.”  Heber C. Kimball said this upon learning of the principle: “I never felt more sorrowful.  I wept days.”  The article seems to suggest that it was a crucible of faith for these very faithful early Saints and that it was only divine revelation from God that allowed them to accept and practice it.  The article described the experience of one early Saint in these words: “Lucy Walker recalled her inner turmoil when Joseph Smith invited her to become his wife.  ‘Every feeling of my soul revolted against it,’ she wrote.  Yet, after several restless nights on her knees in prayer, she found relief as her room ‘filled with a holy influence’ akin to ‘brilliant sunshine.’  She said, ‘My soul was filled with a calm sweet peace that I never knew,’ and ‘supreme happiness took possession of my whole being.’”

                To me the difficulty for us today in accepting plural marriage among the early Saints is really a more general difficulty in accepting the principle that God will require very hard things of His people.  If we can’t accept that God tries His people and requires them sometimes to pass through great challenges, then it will be problematic to believe that He would have commanded such a thing.  Our scriptures record this very uncomfortable statement: “Therefore, they must needs be chastened and tried, even as Abraham, who was commanded to offer up his only son” (D&C 101:4).  To believe in the divinity of the Lord’s command to His early Saints regarding plural marriage is, it seems to me, a belief that God will try His people.  It’s the same difficulty we have in explaining why He would let Job who was described as “perfect” suddenly lose children, property, his health, and the support of family and friends, or why God would allow his faithful servant Paul (who gave his whole life to the Lord) be “beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, imprisoned, and… [experience] many other trials.”  We face the same conundrum as we try to reason why He would allow a group of faithful women and children be burned in a fire or a group of 1005 recent converts be slaughtered with the sword (Alma 14:9-10, Alma 24:22).   It’s just as hard to accept the requirement of plural marriage to me as to accept that a loving God would let a faithful stake president lose his wife and five children in a fire or that He could allow a believing Latter-day Saint woman at the time of WWII to lose her husband and all four children as she walked on foot through the cold on a thousand mile journey. 

There are countless other stories about trials and tests we could name that the righteous have passed through, and they all point to this same principle: “The Lord seeth fit to chasten his people; yea, he trieth their patience and their faith” (Mosiah 23:21).  Accepting this principle of course does not prove that plural marriage as instituted by Joseph Smith was indeed a revelation from God, but having a testimony that God does try His people can help us perhaps understand why such a revelation might have been given.  Ultimately, though, the most important question for us is not about plural marriage but about whether we can stay true to our faith when we are called to pass through our own refiner’s fire.  At that point we must, as Elder Ballard said, find our own personal answer to the question: “Will ye also go away?”