“Forgiveness”

Yet another message for Easter Week from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:

https://www.mormon.org/easter/principles-of-peace/forgiveness

By the way:

We’ve been in “Holy Week” since last Sunday — Palm Sunday — and, traditionally, today is Good Friday.  I’ve expressed the wish before that Latter-day Saints paid at least a little bit more attention to Holy Week or Easter Week.  (I’m not alone in that.)  So I’m pleased that there’s now a simple entry regarding Easter Week on the official Church website.

It’s not “Holy Week” as such — that is, the specifics of Maundy Thursday and Holy Saturday and so forth — that I care about.  My more fundamental hope is that we’ll pay more attention to Easter altogether.  To the suffering and atonement of Christ and to his resurrection.  Those ideas and events are, after all, absolutely basic to our doctrine, utterly essential to our hope.  “The fundamental principles of our religion,” taught Joseph Smith, “are the testimony of the Apostles and Prophets, concerning Jesus Christ, that He died, was buried, and rose again the third day, and ascended into heaven; and all other things which pertain to our religion are only appendages to it.”

If I had to choose between them — which I’m happy that I do not — I would plainly have to go with Easter over Christmas as the more theologically and biblically significant holy day, the more fundamentally important of the two.  And yet, perhaps because it hasn’t (yet) been as significantly commercialized — compare the ubiquitous “only 364 shopping days left till Christmas!” and the retail store Christmas decorations that begin to appear, now, sometime in October — many, even, of us churchgoers scarcely know that it’s Easter time until we wake up on Sunday morning in the pew and realize what day it is.  And, once in a while, we Latter-day Saints even have church services on Easter — on Easter! — devoted to Relief Society or the welfare program or some such theme.

In this, I think we’ve perhaps been taking our cues too much from the indifference of the surrounding culture rather than from the teachings of the Gospel itself.

In my neighborhood, we’re having stake conference this weekend.  We’re going to get a new stake presidency.  That worries me a bit.  I’m hoping, pleading, that Easter doesn’t get lost in the press of business.