Years ago I read a story about an early twentieth-century Church leader who was assigned by the First Presidency to visit a stake in Utah.[1] He spoke in the general session of stake conference on Sunday morning and announced that he would give a fireside that evening on the “mysteries of the gospel.” The announcement excited the congregation, and many returned that evening with friends in tow hoping to learn the location of the lost ten tribes of Israel or the date of the Lord’s Second Coming. Instead, the leader spoke on the mystery of living the simple principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ, of walking the heartfelt talk we talk every week in Church. Why is it so hard for us to be kind to others when Jesus taught that the very essence of Christian life is to love our enemies? Why is it so hard for us to live up to our faith commitments when we profess to love the Lord with all our heart?

The Church leader, I believe, was proposing that the mysteries of the gospel reside not in obscure speculations regarding the lost ten tribes and such, but rather in the gap between our weekly professions of faith and our everyday behavior. Those mysteries lie along the good-evil axis that cuts through the heart of every one of us. Seen this way, the real mysteries of the gospel are not intellectual puzzles to be solved by academic argument and scriptural proof-texting. Rather they are universal, ongoing struggles of the soul. They lie so squarely within us that they are iterated almost out of sight by their deep familiarity. Academically speaking, they are simple mysteries because we have all known them from the age of accountability, the time when the difference between good and evil began to dawn within us.

Alongside the simple mysteries of the gospel lie the fundamental principles of the gospel, which are also simple in that they coincide with a child’s natural inclination to come unto Christ.

Being Right but Wrong

Viewed against the backdrop of history and from the vantage point of the early twentieth-first century, the Church has always been on the wrong side of some political or social issue. In his epistle to Philemon, Paul appears to condone slavery, and elsewhere he seems to instruct women to be silent in church (see 1 Corinthians 14:34–35).[2] To the extent that they recognize these now unpopular predilections in Paul, most Christians overlook them by insisting that for all the good he accomplished, he was nevertheless a product of his culture. He had to work within existing social norms, some of them misguided from our perspective, in order to preach the gospel throughout the Mediterranean world. And he may not have even felt that human slavery was wrong, it being so deeply embedded in his understanding of social reality. But as he himself stated, he was a weak, imperfect vessel of the Lord (see 2 Corinthians 12:7–10). He never pretended to be faultless or above reproach. In fact, he delighted in his weakness and in the astonishing fact that God had chosen one so inadequate to take the good news of Christ’s Resurrection beyond Palestine. It was his keenly felt weakness that kept him humble and qualified him for the work.

Along with Paul, Peter helped Church members realize that God is no respecter of persons, that the gospel of Jesus Christ is intended for all people, regardless of ethnicity, gender, or social status. But as is clear from the book of Acts, this is an understanding he had to grow into. He too was an imperfect vessel of the Lord. He was, however, willing to learn, and what he learned was not just the story of Christ but the everyday necessity of emulating him. “For what glory is it,” he wrote, “if, when ye be buffeted [punished] for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? but if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God” (1 Peter 2:20). We emulate Christ not just when we meekly submit to punishment for our sins, but more magnificently when we meekly suffer for the good we do. After all, “Christ . . . suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps: who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth: who when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously [God]” (1 Peter 2:21–23).[3]

Four Stories

The gospel of Jesus Christ turns things upside down by asking us to return good for evil. This would be a hollow and unrealistic request had not such an exchange, cosmic in its import, already occurred. Christ was the lamb without sin or blemish “slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8). If anyone had just cause to strike back, launch counteraccusations, and call down fire from heaven, it was he. And yet, as Isaiah says, “he open[ed] not his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7). He submitted meekly to his Father’s will, and his submission inspires and enables our own.

Far from being an unrealistic request, the gospel requirement to return good for evil invites us toward Reality itself. When we are unfairly victimized, when someone else accuses us unjustly, our first impulse may be to strike back and repay the hurt. Christ, however, would have us elevate the situation by returning good for evil. “A soft answer turneth away wrath,” according to Proverbs (Proverbs 15:1)—a kind, magnanimous answer.

When our children were young, our daughter Katie and her friend Sylvia found a doll while walking home from school. Each wanted the doll for herself, and an argument soon began as to who saw the doll first and who had the stronger claim to it. Sylvia—now, not so much of a friend—ended up taking the doll, while Katie went home emptyhanded. A few minutes later, there was a knock at the door. When my wife Janet answered it, there was Sylvia with her mother, who was obviously ready to continue the argument, even though her daughter already had the doll. As Sylvia’s mother contentiously rehearsed her daughter’s claim to the doll, Janet smiled agreeably. Then when the two visitors were satisfied that they had settled the matter once and for all, Janet thanked them for coming and said goodbye. She then turned to Katie and said, “Let’s make them a plate of cookies!”

It’s a simple story, but one that throws into relief two ways of handling conflict. The first way is to always stick up for yourself and your loved ones (your tribe), no matter how trifling the issue. The second way is to decide to rise above the conflict in the interest of peace and good will. The first approach may seem heroic, and surely in some extreme instances one has no choice but to fight back, but it should not be our first option. More often than not it perpetuates and intensifies problems rather than solving them.

It is better to change the rules of the confrontation by defusing anger through kindness. President George Albert Smith did this on a hot summer day when city workers showed up in his neighborhood to do street repair. As the men grew frustrated, they began to curse loudly, and their foul language floated through windows that had been opened to fight the heat. (This was in the days before air conditioning.) One of the neighbors stepped out to ask the men to tone down their language, pointing out that George Albert Smith, a prominent leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, lived nearby and could easily hear their cursing. Not surprisingly, this request simply angered the men—they, after all, were the ones huffing and puffing—and caused them to swear more vigorously. Knowing that actions speak louder than words, President Smith took lemonade out to the men, poured them each a glass, expressed his concern for their plight, and invited them to sit beneath one of his trees and visit with him for a few minutes. Afterward there was no more cursing.[4]

President Smith short-circuited a potentially volatile and certainly uncomfortable situation through the simple act of offering refreshment and kindness to men who were tired and frustrated. For the men at that moment the sympathy-laced lemonade was the water of life that Jesus promised his followers. In Lew Wallace’s book Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, Judah Ben-Hur is falsely accused of trying to assassinate a Roman official and sentenced to slavery while his mother and sister are sent to prison and the family wealth is confiscated. Then, while being marched through the desert to the galleys, Ben-Hur receives from Jesus a much-needed drink of water while his Roman guards are momentarily and miraculously incapacitated. Later in the novel, when Jesus is arrested and led to Calvary, Ben-Hur strives to help him but cannot. Unable to return Jesus’s blessing, Ben-Hur nevertheless comes away with a clearer understanding of his own circumstance: he has not suffered as this man has—this man called Jesus of Nazareth—and is not so innocent of wrongdoing.

The experience rescues Ben-Hur from his thirst for revenge, a thirst stemming from his belief that justice is satisfied when one’s enemies are vanquished. The higher, more expansive realization that all suffer, that I do not have a monopoly on the problems of life, brings relief, hope, and joy in the Lord. Paul stated that his sufferings gave him fellowship with Christ: “From henceforth let no man trouble me: for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus” (Galatians 6:17).[5] These marks—stigmata in Greek, meaning the scars and wounds that Paul gained while being beaten, whipped, and imprisoned for Christ—were his proof that he belonged to Christ. He gladly assimilated the persecutions he endured to the far greater agony of Christ. Peter did the same, as evidenced by his declaration that we should not recoil from punishment even when we are innocent of wrongdoing, for this is one of the touchstones of Christian discipleship.

Chieko Okazaki taught that “when we thank God for our trials, tribulations, irritations, and afflictions, something happens to transform them into blessings.”[6] Similarly, James wrote that bearing our hurts meekly and joyfully fits us for heaven: “My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations [trials]; knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing” (James 1:2–4). Waiting patiently upon the Lord rather than reflexively fighting back allows us to win the larger battle of life. Thereby we tap into Christ’s Atonement and fly free of Satan’s legalistic claim on our souls.

In Stephen Vincent Benét’s The Devil and Daniel Webster, Jabez Stone, a down-on-his-luck New Hampshire farmer, one day muttered to himself that he was almost tempted to sell his soul to the devil for just one good harvest. He immediately regretted his momentary indiscretion but was not surprised when a polite, well-mannered gentleman showed up on his doorstep the next day. Introducing himself as Mr. Scratch, the gentleman sat down with Stone and worked up a contract for seven successful harvests. Stone signed the contract and immediately began to see a difference in his farm. He grew wealthy and highly respected for his farming skills. Eventually, seven years passed, and then another three when Scratch granted an extension to the contract. Then came the day of reckoning. Out of desperation, Stone hired Daniel Webster, a widely renowned lawyer, to defend him in a jury trial.

The courtroom drama swung back and forth. As Webster rehearsed his argument, he began to realize that Mr. Scratch was ensnaring him as well as Stone. Contention is the devil’s game, and Webster found it curious that as he thundered out his defense of Stone, Mr. Scratch glowed more brightly and smiled ever more pleasingly. The devil was sucking him into his own hellish dwelling, never mind the merits and particulars of the argument. Before falling headfirst into the hellhole, however, Webster caught himself, changed tactics, and started talking about the transcendent promise of a new morning and the glorious founding of the American nation, notwithstanding some bad actors and sorrowful mistakes along the way. “He admitted all the wrong that had ever been done,” writes Benét. “But he showed how, out of the wrong and the right, the suffering and the starvations, something new had come. And everybody had played a part in it, even the traitors.” He also spoke of Jabez Stone, stating that although he was “hard and mean” in some ways, he was still a good man who didn’t deserve to suffer for all eternity just for wanting to improve his circumstance. And all the while, Daniel Webster told “the story and the failures and the endless journey of mankind. They got tricked and trapped and bamboozled, but it was a great journey. And no demon that was ever foaled could know the inwardness of it—it took a man to do that.”[7]

This kind of talk was kryptonite to Mr. Scratch. Unable to endure it, he grew weak and fawning. Finally, “with a kick that would have stunned a horse,” Daniel Webster booted him out the door, and he was never seen again in New Hampshire (though Benét won’t vouch for Massachusetts or Vermont). The jury ruled in favor of Jabez Stone.

Making Sense of Unfairness

Of course life is unfair. That is part of the point of our being here—to try to fix the unfairness in the Lord’s way, which means reaching for something higher than mean-spirited contention. It is as if mortality is a test to see if we will follow Christ by rising to his example. If we do, we cannot help but make the world a better place.

When Judah Ben-Hur learned of the birth of the Christ child, he rejoiced, thinking that Christ had come to smash the Roman Empire. Thrusting down one’s enemies, after all, was part of what it meant to be a king in his day. Balthasar (one of the three wise men who had visited the baby Jesus some years earlier), however, explained to him that Christ would be a different kind of king, one who would expand our hearts and minds spiritually. His kingdom, though on the earth, would be otherworldly and untouched by the traps and limitations of mortality.

Hearing this, Ben-Hur replies that he cannot understand it: “What thou sayest . . . is a riddle to me. I never heard of such a kingdom.”[8] In the Church we often say that many first-century Jews missed the Messiah because, like Ben-Hur, they were expecting a military conqueror. But this might also be our failing if we think we can bring about God’s kingdom through disputation and contention, if we are inclined to criticize and argue before trying to understand and forgive.

Lew Wallace, the author of Ben-Hur, knew what it meant to be criticized and unfairly scapegoated. As a major general, he commanded a division under General Ulysses S. Grant during the Battle of Shiloh, an early engagement of the American Civil War. Although the Union army won the battle, Grant, asked to justify the high casualty count, blamed the costly victory on Wallace’s failure to follow orders. Wallace was temporarily stripped of his field command and spent the rest of his life trying to tell his side of the story to win back his reputation. Years later when he won fame and wealth for Ben-Hur, the pain ebbed but never went away. “Shiloh and its slanders!” he wrote. “Will the world ever acquit me of them? If I were guilty, I would not feel them as keenly.”[9] And when sales of his novel were cresting at record levels: “I have letters from publishers on both sides of the sea, and so, may the end of life be swift or slow, I may be found at this work. Into such pleasant life but one hurt — the old wound at Shiloh.”[10]

Lest one suppose that God’s will is accomplished when the unfair hurts visited upon us are quickly rectified, consider the link between Wallace’s “old wound at Shiloh” and his blockbuster novel, Ben-Hur. The Civil War is cloaked in religious imagery. Some call it penance or even atonement for the long practice of slavery. Abraham Lincoln felt this way. In his second inaugural address, delivered just forty-one days before his assassination, he stated:

Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago [by the psalmist in Psalm 19:9] so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”[11]

Wallace spent forty-three years, from the 1862 Shiloh battle to his 1905 death, trying to bring Grant’s accusation—deemed unfair by most modern Civil War historians—into perspective; Black slaves waited 250 years just to be freed without compensation, and even then for many the freedom was more hypothetical than real; Lincoln never got the chance to find lasting relief in the victory he so fervently prayed for. He was shot on Good Friday, five days after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, and slipped away the next morning. News of his death rocked the nation and made a hash of Easter Sunday. Mourners spontaneously lauded him as “the savior of the union.” Better than most, he understood the war as a calamity for all parties. There were no real victors because both sides suffered tremendously, and neither was blameless in its provocation and prosecution of the war. Interested only in healing the divide, Lincoln had refused to gloat over Lee’s surrender.

Wallace stated that he undertook to write Ben-Hur after conversing with Robert Ingersoll, a fellow veteran of Shiloh who denied God’s existence.[12] Contemplating the novel, Wallace saw it as an opportunity to plumb the depths of the Christ story as recounted in the New Testament. Living with the wound of Shiloh, he poured his pain into the tale of Judah Ben-Hur, a Jewish aristocrat who longs for revenge but in the end realizes that the gospel frees us from the tight little ego-cage of revenge. There is, after all, no Christian basis for revenge, for Christ meekly—without thought of revenge—endured for our sake far greater injustices than we will ever suffer. The arc of the cosmos consequently bends toward mercy and forgiveness.

After its publication, Ben-Hur struck a chord that, according to John Swansburg, “would help America forget the Civil War.”[13] It was the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century, with at least 500,000 copies in print by the end of the century. To follow Howard Miller:

Within twenty years of publication, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ stood second only to the Bible as the best-selling book in America. It might be argued that if Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) had helped divide the Union in the 1850s, Wallace’s Ben-Hur helped to reunite the nation following Reconstruction. The novel resonated with some of the most significant issues in late Victorian culture: gender and family; slavery and freedom; ethnicity and empire; and nationhood and citizenship—all of which emerge from the crucial relationship of Wallace’s two protagonists: one of them exemplifying action, striving, and revenge; the other absolute, sacrificial love and redemption. The combination of their stories proved, for more than a century, irresistible.[14]

The novel was quickly adapted to stage in 1899 and then to film, first in 1907 and again in 1925. Many today have seen the 1959 production starring Charlton Heston. It won eleven Academy Awards.

Victor Davis Hanson described the book as the spark that ignited the “the entire Ben-Hur phenomenon,” an impact still felt today, though in subsiding measure. The novel, he states, “began the strange nexus in American life, for good or ill, between literature, motion pictures, advertising, and popular culture . . . [and] in the process it spun out industries of songs, skits, ads, clothes, and fan clubs.”[15]

It also appealed to many readers’ religious sensibilities, piquing their interest in Palestine and deepening their faith in Christianity. At a time when novels were religiously suspect and most Americans never dreamt of visiting the Holy Land, Ben-Hur brought home God’s love of broken humanity in profuse and plausible detail. It was not merely another recitation of the Christ story but a lens through which wounded readers could relive that story as it played out in the life of a fellow human being. The person of Ben-Hur, his trials, grievances, and eventual change of heart, linked readers with Christ. As the New York Post reported in Wallace’s obituary: “Shakespeare and Milton are above the range of honest folk, the Bible they are often content to take at second hand, but Ben-Hur brings grandeur nearer our common dust.”[16]

The chariot race between Ben-Hur and Messala, his friend-turned-enemy, is the climax of the 1959 film and one of Hollywood’s all-time epic scenes. But in my mind the scene is so spectacular that it threatens to overshadow Ben-Hur’s dawning realization that anger and revenge are self-perpetuating. Ben-Hur gets his revenge by defeating Messala, but afterward Messala, fatally wounded after being flung from and run over by his chariot, vengefully informs Ben-Hur that his mother and sister are diseased and living in the valley of the lepers. Messala then adds, “It goes on, Judah; the race is not over.”

One unkind act begets another, ad nauseam. The only way to break the chain reaction of hate is to forgive, and Christ gives us that power. This is the quiet message found in the story of Judah Ben-Hur, a story rooted in the hurt that Lew Wallace unfairly suffered in the aftermath of the Battle of Shiloh. Although Wallace lived with that hurt until his death, his struggle to make sense of it helped a nation move on from the horrors and injustices of the Civil War.[17] Summoned from a deep wound that wouldn’t fully heal, Ben-Hur has been a healing balm for millions of readers and viewers. The old wound at Shiloh, a biblical word connoting the coming of the Messiah, served a large redemptive purpose, though it was but a pale likeness of Christ’s suffering.

Notes

[1] My memory is that the leader was J. Golden Kimball. Although I have not been able to document the story, I like it for the point it makes.

[2] See however 1 Corinthians 11:5, where Paul speaks of women praying and prophesying, apparently among other believers.

[3] See also 1 Peter 3: 17: “For it is better, if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for well doing, than for evil doing.”

[4] “The Power of Kindness,” Teachings of the Presidents of the Church: George Albert Smith (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/.

[5] Peter similarly wrote that suffering brings joy and makes us “partakers of Christ’s sufferings” (1 Peter 4:12–13).

[6] Chieko Okazaki, Lighten Up! (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1993), 45.

[7]The Devil and Daniel Webster (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1937), https://www.google.com/books/.

[8] Lewis Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (New York: Harper, 1880), 280, https://wikisource.org/.

[9] John Swansburg, “The Passion of Lew Wallace: The Incredible Story of How a Disgraced Civil War General Became One of the Best-Selling Novelists in American History,” http://www.slate.com/.

[10] Victor Davis Hanson, Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think (New York: Doubleday, 2003), chap. 2, e-book.

[11] “Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address,” 4 May 1865, https://www.nps.gov/.

[12] Hanson, Ripples of Battle, chap. 2, e-book.

[13] Swansburg, “Passion of Lew Wallace.”

[14] Howard Miller, “The Charioteer and the Christ: Ben-Hur in America from the Gilded Age to the Culture Wars,” Indiana Magazine of History 104, no. 2 (June 2008): 155–56.

[15] Hanson, Ripples of Battle, chap. 2, e-book.

[16] Quoted in Swansburg, “Passion of Lew Wallace.” Here I cannot resist an observation that sometimes it is easier to see Christ reflected in the lives of the good people about us than to see Christ’s light directly. Good people are like the moon in that they reflect the light of the sun (Christ, the “Sun of righteousness” [Malachi 4:2]), a body too brilliant to look at directly (except at sunrise and sunset, perhaps, when the red hues at the earth-sky horizon call to mind the earthly sufferings of Christ). The follow-on admonition is that we should be moons of Christ. We should shine by his light, which shining represents a subdued, more easily seen illustration of his goodness and glory. Judah Ben-Hur was a moon of Christ.

[17] This, however, is not to suggest that the book solved all the issues associated with the Civil War. Reconstruction largely failed in the South, southern states enacted laws that deprived Blacks of their constitutional liberties, racial hatred flourished along with racial crime and murder, and many of the broken promises of the Constitution were not addressed for a century or more. The struggle continues.