3 Nephi 12

You’d do well to listen to these men I’ve picked to help and serve you. They’ll tell you honestly what I’ve just told them. Because I only pick men who are honest to represent me.

And people who aren’t here would do well to listen to you too. Because you were here and witnessed all this. Tell them they need to go to any of these twelve and get baptized and get the same inner warmth that comes from it—not to mention a refund for the gouging price your sins would have cost you.

Now I want to recap some things I taught in Palestine before they killed me over there. And if you’re offended, don’t get any ideas. Because I’m unkillable now.

Blessed are you whose faces droop with the weight of unfulfilled possibilities. You are citizens of heaven already.

Blessed are the depressed—yes, I said that—because I will soothe you through the actions of someone in your life, maybe even someone you’d have never thought of.

Blessed are those who haven’t got an arrogant bone in their bodies, because they already own everything worth owning. And someday I’ll give them the rest.

Blessed are you who salivate for goodness, because someday you’re going to gorge on God’s Spirit.

Blessed are the merciful, because mercy always comes back to you when you need it. And you will.

Blessed are the few whose hearts throb with purity, because God cannot remain invisible to you.

Blessed are people who not only want peace but make it. “Come to papa,” my Father will say to you as he’s always done to me.

Blessed are you when people spit on your conduct because you link it to me. Their small-scale torment doesn’t much matter, since you belong to a different country entirely. And I don’t mean any country that exists on earth.

Blessed are the slandered and rumor-milled, especially when I’m the real target. You are going to howl with joy one day, because you’ll see yourselves in the pantheon of the earth’s historic truth-tellers. You have no idea the reward you’ll one day have handed to you.

You value salt, of course. It’s even used for currency around the world. What if I said that you are the earth’s real salt? Imagine that. Then think about how worthless you’d be if the saltiness had gone out of your taste. Trash, that’s all.

Or imagine this: you are a kind of lighthouse. The world is sliding off its sandy foundations and floating toward hell. What would the point be of turning off your beacon to save energy? Okay, I’m getting too futuristic here. Scratch that.

Think of this: If a city sits on a hill, everyone sees it. That’s you.

Or think of this: Have you ever lit a candle just so you can stick it under a bucket? No. The whole point is to light the house when it’s dark. If you act well, you will enlighten the house of the world. (I apologize if God gets the glory for what you do. But you’ll need humility to face darkness anyway.)

I’m not here to trample Moses, et al. I’m here to roll up those scrolls and get to work with you. I’m not about erasure. I’m about living what was once just speech.

The only thing that speech was for is to bring you to me and my ways. The rest was to break your hearts and make you feel need. Not desire.

Now, I have commandments of my own, which I’m just starting to share with you. If you slough those off like you did Moses, there’s no hope for you.

Let’s go way back. I know you’ve heard that if you kill, God will judge you. But I’m here to tell you that God judges your anger too. And, gracious, if you call your brother a fool, hellfire is lapping at your feet.

If you want to be part of my tribe—since I know you’re so steeped in tribalism—follow this rule: If you recall you brother has something against you—and who doesn’t have a brother with something against them?—go straight to him and get straight with him. Then come to me, with that backpack of grudgery now empty and ready for some honest content.

Indeed, take it on principle: try to agree with your foes on the front end of a fight, because the back end can get nastier than you’d suspect. Every fight becomes a cage fight.

You’ve also heard about adultery. But it’s not just the crass corporeal version God worries about. It’s the mental too. You look at a woman and think—I won’t say it here in mixed company, but you know—then that’s a kind of adultery too. Googly eyes + a touch of imagination = adultery of the heart.

I hope you can get over that habit, which I know you men here have down to an art. Listen, if I can carry a cross on my whipped back up a hill to get nailed to it, hung from it, and suffocate from lung constriction—all for you, mind you—I think you can back off your hormones for me in return.

Sidebar regarding divorce: You’ve been taught that all it takes is a notice handed to your wife. (Women don’t have that privilege in return. Maybe later.) But I’m here to tell you that if you move your wife out for anything but her having sex with another man—real sex, not just the fantasy version I spoke of—you are actually forcing her into a kind of adultery; and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery with her. I’m not making this up, though we may have some translation issues. Take it down for now and we’ll fix it later, if needed.

You’ve also heard that “what you have sworn you must accomplish.” That’s how they say it in China, anyway. And I like that formulation. But, seriously, swearing oaths is preposterous. Why? Because there’s something about it that’s premised on cosmic stability. But the cosmos isn’t stable. More to the point, you have no idea what is and isn’t stable at any moment. And—witness those earthquakes and fires and floods—there’s virtually nothing you can do about it.

God’s got the keys to physics. Biology, too. Because, for example, although Semites like you swear by their heads, they have no control over the color of their hair. Oh sure, they can pour dyes on it, but the roots grow back according to processes out of anyone’s control.

In any case, if you have something to affirm, just say yes and mean yes or say no and mean no. Anything else is presumptuous. And presumption is an evil premise for living.

Your scriptures say, “Lose an eye, take an eye. Lose a tooth, take a tooth.” That is so simpleminded. Utterly designed for children’s games. When I say I want you to be like children, it’s not like that.

You should not just transcend others’ power to hurt you. If they smack your face, offer them the other cheek. If they sue you for your coat, offer them the closet. If they hold a knife to you and say, “Walk a mile,” shock them by walking two.

It’s all about confounding ignorant, brute force. You do that by submitting to it then mocking it by the parody of overkill and showing you can take whatever they dish out and then some. This sounds implausible, but it works.

If anyone asks to borrow something, don’t be stingy. “Aren’t we all beggars?” I think Benjamin put it.

By the way, in that regard you’ve been taught to love your neighbor but hate your enemy. Aside from the obvious false obverse-parallelism of “neighbor” and “enemy,” I have a problem with this. I put it this way: love the hell out of your enemies. If people curse you, kiss them back. And aside from such outward improbable faux-reprisals, you should actually pray for your rivals, even the abusive ones.

Look, God does that all the time. If he let rain fall or sun shine only on those who liked him, the whole framework of meteorology, of which he’s quite proud, would collapse.

My updates on these old sacred truisms constitute what I’d call fulfillment. Those old laws were, at best, promises to make better ones. I’m the delivery man for those better ones.

Be perfect? Well, yes, at least in the ways I’m defining now—God-based, nature-based, not religio-lawyer-based.