159: Remembering Easter

In this Good Friday episode Denver discusses the events that culminated in the act of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, sacrificing his life for us. …I had just turned 12 at the start of the month, and… Three out of four of my grandparents had died before I was born. The only living grandparent that I had when I was born was still around when I was 12. And she wouldn't die for many years. I had not seen or heard of anyone in my family or in my immediate circle of friends who died. The only real death that had intruded into my awareness was President John Kennedy, and that seemed fabulously theatrical, distant, and more like theater than reality. But in August of 1965, we moved from elementary schools to the junior high school; there were East Elementary (where I went to school), and there was North Elementary, and there was West Elementary. And there were kids in the town that (and the surrounding area) that you never met, because if they didn't go to your elementary school, you wouldn't cross their paths. But when they combined into the junior high school, kids from all over came. And there was one kid in particular that I became pretty good friends with in fairly short order. Among other things, we shared a study hall, and he was an absolute cut-up. He was capable of extraordinarily effective mischief. He knew how to make a pencil stick to the ceiling of the study hall. And he knew how to time things when the teacher's back was turned. And he and I became really quite good friends for as short a time period as we had from August 'til October. I think I liked him more than anyone else that was in my immediate circle of friends. And on Friday, September 29th, all the buses lined up; this kid lived way out of town in a little place called Bruneau. He was bused in from Bruneau so he had a long bus ride to get home. And as he was getting ready to get on the buses, I was hanging out with them until the buses were to depart. My last words to him (which were intended to be funny) was, "Don't go and get yourself killed this weekend." And so my buddy, Waldo—Waldo Shetler—got on the bus and took off. On Saturday, he was killed. And on Monday, we heard the story that down in Bruneau, he was riding his bike, and a hay truck hit him and killed him. That was the first time that death entered into my consciousness. And I don't recall at that moment being as sad as I was shocked, surprised, troubled, trying to figure out what this new reality meant. But because Waldo Shetler was the first person in my life who died, the first person of any proximity, I've thought about him every time death gets close again. I've known a few people who were resigned to dying—they were in hospice; they had a terminal illness; they had a terminal problem that they knew they were not going to survive. And I've told quite a number of people in that position, "Hey, when you get to the other side, will you let Waldo Shetler know his buddy Denver still remembers him and thinks about him? And someday I'll come look him up personally, but you tell him I said hello." So I don't know how many messages Waldo's received over the years since he died. He was about seven months older than me, and he turned 12 much earlier in the school… Well, actually, he turned 12 before the school year began. But he's buried in Bruneau at the Bruneau Cemetery. And I've never made it back there to visit the grave of Waldo, but I think I'd like to do that—because what he represents in my consciousness is the introduction of death into this life, awareness of it at a personal level. Well, Easter's coming up on Sunday the 17th of this month. And when Steve asked us to talk, one of the things that came first in the conversation was we oughta talk about Easter, say something about Easter, so that it doesn't come and go without notice. There's a passage—it's early in the Book of Mormon; in our Scriptures, it's Second Nephi chapter 11, verse 8—where, recording about their religion and how they practiced it, they write, We talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ, and we write according to our prophecies that our children may know to what source they may look for the remission of their sins. You know, if you're talking, and you're rejoicing, and you're preaching, and you're prophesying… For those who are living, the remission of sins is the great thing that we can experience and long to have and want to receive an inheritance of. But in the bigger picture, it's the resurrection on Easter morning that is the great triumph because it breaks that enemy that God introduced at the time of the fall that will ultimately cost every one of us our lives. John's prophecy about the judgment and the end of times (when we finally get down to the very end) reflects this. He writes this in Revelation chapter 8, verse 8: And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away. "Wipe away all [the] tears from their eyes…there shall be no more death." I mean, death has taken quite a number of people; in fact, of late, it's taken a number of people that I know and have been friends with, and I'm sorry to see them part. And the first great thing that gets wiped away is death—and then our sorrows and our crying and our pain. But that loss of life—that ending that cuts off your association for a temporary time—always leaves us, I think, in a position of thinking back about losses and of our own death—because it's inevitable; it's coming; it's unavoidable; and in some respects, depending upon the condition that you wind up in, it's a release (and a welcome one at that). Well, Christ's accomplishment, His great achievement, began in Gethsemane and culminated with the resurrection. What I find interesting is that when the Lord has taken the time to talk about His experience, what He talks about is not the experience on the cross, and He doesn't talk about the crucifixion. When He spoke (in modern revelation) about what it was that He had accomplished, the place where He goes to is Gethsemane. In the T&C (T&C 1—it's the Joseph Smith History) in Joseph Smith History 17, at paragraph 5, he says, Repent, lest I smite you by the rod of my mouth, and by my wrath, and by my anger that your sufferings be sore. What I find interesting is that the way in which He's going to smite us, He defines as by "the rod of my mouth," meaning that the words He speaks are what will cause us this pain and the suffering. Your sufferings be sore, how sore you know not, how exquisite you know not, yea, how hard to bear you know not. For behold, I God, have suffered these things for all that they might not suffer if they would repent. But if they would not repent, they must suffer even as I, which suffering caused myself even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain and to bleed at every pore and to suffer both body and spirit, and would that I might not drink the bitter cup and shrink. Nevertheless, glory be to the Father and I partook, and finished my preparations unto the children of man. Wherefore I command you again to repent, lest I humble you by my almighty power, and that you confess your sins, lest you suffer these punishments of which I have spoken, which in the smallest, yea, even in the least degree, you've tasted, at the time I withdrew my spirit. See, the place in which He suffered body and spirit and would that He "might not drink the bitter cup and shrink" was in the garden. And so, He doesn't mention the crucifixion; He focuses upon the suffering that went on in Gethsemane—which also was covered, yet again, in the revelations that have come in this continuance of the Restoration, and that's in T&C section 161, which starts out describing: …a view of the Lord kneeling in prayer…in a dark place. The air was heavy and overcast with [shadow]. The man beheld the Lord praying in Gethsemene on the night of His betrayal and before His crucifixion. All the Lord had previously done in His mortal ministry by healing the sick, raising the dead, giving sight to the blind, restoring hearing to the deaf, curing the leper, and ministering relief to others as he taught was but a prelude to what the Lord was now to do on this dark, oppressive night. (T&C 161:1-2) And then it describes how the Lord, in prayer, began vicariously suffering. And He goes through these waves of torment, which was the Lord kneeling in prayer, exposed to the guilt, the shame, the recriminations, the difficulties, the pains of both offending God and your fellow man AND being offended by your fellow man, and the torment of the mind and the spirit and the soul in trying to overcome and reconcile yourself back into the presence of God the Father; shedding all of what you feel when you are smitten by the rod of the mouth of that pure being who is God the Father, and the recognition that you are out of adjustment/you are out of sync with the Almighty; you are not good and pure and holy, and you are in the presence of a good and a just and a Holy Being. The Gospel reflects that an angel came strengthening Him—which is not altogether an accurate description of what went on. He… The Father's presence never left the Son throughout all His sufferings. And indeed, part of the Son's sufferings was caused by the necessity to reconcile peacefully His experience of this unclean, unworthy state (with the feelings of shame and guilt that are caused by not being reconciled with God), and then overcoming that and being able to reconcile Himself again with the Father and coming to a place of peace and harmony and at-one-ness with the Father that this awful experience had disrupted. It shattered the harmony that existed between the Father and the Son that had existed throughout His entire ministry,...