- Moderator
- #81
I found the other account that was causing me to ponder forgiveness:
I remember always being moved by that. There are other details I know about that mob attack from other sources. From that night on, Joseph had a chipped tooth. The sermon he preached on the next day was on the topic of forgiveness.
I have to say, I likely would have been angry as well. But that's when we need to have forgiveness and charity the most isn't it?
Our Christian Challenge
I think perhaps so far I have made you think only of the rather obvious transgressions young Latter-day Saints face, the temptations Satan never seems to keep very subtle. But what about the gospel-living that isn't so obvious and may be of a higher order still? Let me shift both the tone and the temptations just slightly and cite other examples of our Christian challenge.
On the night of March 24, 1832, a dozen men stormed the Hiram, Ohio, home where Joseph and Emma Smith were staying. Both were physically and emotionally spent, not only from all the travails of the young Church at the time but also because on this particular evening they had been up caring for their two adopted twins, born eleven months earlier on the same day that Emma had given birth to--and then lost--their own twins. Emma had gone to bed first while Joseph stayed up with the children; then she had arisen to take her turn, encouraging her husband to get some sleep. No sooner had he begun to doze than he heard his wife give a terrifying scream and found himself being torn from the house and very nearly being torn limb from limb.
Cursing as they went, the mob that had seized him were swearing to kill Joseph if he resisted. One man grabbed him by the throat until he lost consciousness from lack of breath. He came to only to overhear part of their conversation on whether he should be murdered. It was determined that for now he would simply be stripped naked, beaten senseless, tarred and feathered, and left to fend for himself in the bitter March night. Stripped of his clothing, fighting off fists and tar paddles on every side, and resisting a vial of some liquid--perhaps poison--which he shattered with his teeth as it was forced into his mouth, he miraculously managed to fight off the entire mob and eventually made his way back to the house. In the dim light his wife thought the tar stains covering his body were blood stains, and she fainted at the sight.
Friends spent the entire night scraping and removing the tar and applying liniments to his scratched and battered body. I now quote directly from the Prophet Joseph's record:
By morning I was ready to be clothed again. This being the Sabbath morning, the people assembled for meeting at the usual hour of worship, and among them came also the mobbers [of the night before. Then he names them.] With my flesh all scarified and defaced, I preached to the congregation as usual, and in the afternoon of the same day baptized three individuals. [HC 1:264]
Unfortunately, one of the adopted twins, growing worse from the exposure and turmoil of the night, died the following Friday. "With my flesh all scarified and defaced, I preached to the congregation as usual"! To that slimy band of cowards who by Friday next will quite literally be the murderers of your child? Stand there hurting from the hair of your head that was pulled and then tarred into a mat, hurting right down to your foot that was nearly torn off being wrenched out the door of your own home? Preach the gospel to that damnable bunch of sniveling reprobates? Surely this is no time to stand by principle. It is daylight now and the odds aren't twelve to one anymore. Let's just conclude this Sunday service right now and go outside to finish last evening's business. It was, after all, a fairly long night for Joseph and Emma; maybe it should be an equally short morning for this dirty dozen who have snickeringly shown up for church.
But those feelings that I have even now just reading about this experience 150 years later--and feelings I know that would have raged in my Irish blood that morning--mark only one of the differences between me and the Prophet Joseph Smith. You see, a disciple of Christ--which I testify to you Joseph was and is--always has to be a disciple; the judge does not give any time off for bad behavior. A Christian always stands on principle, even as old Holland is out there swinging a pitchfork and screaming an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth--forgetting, as dispensation after dispensation has forgotten, that this only leaves everyone blind and toothless.
No, the good people, the strong people, dig down deeper and find a better way. Like Christ, they know that when it is hardest to be so is precisely the time you have to be at your best. As another confession to you, I have always feared that I could not have said at Calvary's cross, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do." Not after the spitting, and the cursing, and the thorns, and the nails. Not if they don't care or understand that this horrible price in personal pain is being paid for them. But that's just the time when the fiercest kind of integrity and loyalty to high purpose must take over. That's just the time when it matters the very most and when everything else hangs in the balance--for surely it did that day. You and I won't ever find ourselves on that cross, but we repeatedly find ourselves at the foot of it. And how we act there will speak volumes about what we think of Christ's character and his call for us to be his disciples.
I remember always being moved by that. There are other details I know about that mob attack from other sources. From that night on, Joseph had a chipped tooth. The sermon he preached on the next day was on the topic of forgiveness.
I have to say, I likely would have been angry as well. But that's when we need to have forgiveness and charity the most isn't it?