What is Zion? How do we build it?
Faith Matters resources to accompany your Come Follow Me study: Feb 2-Feb 8
I can help build Zion.
“We never read or hear about a Zion person, right? It’s always a Zion people.”
—Melinda Brown, “One Heart, One Mind: Cultivating a Zion Mindset”
Zion is not just the millennial community that greets the Savior upon His return and lives with him in peace for a millennium. Zion should come now. Zion is a physical place and a figurative community. Zion is a place of diversity and peace. In Zion, we have everlasting joy.
—Samuel Benson, “A Zion for All of Us”
Zion, ultimately, is a city of friends, but with friendships deepened by a sacramental relationality enabled by the love of Christ—an alchemy of grace where acquaintances can be transformed into kin. For Latter-day Saints, perhaps our most beautiful doctrine is that families are forever, and so are our friendships. “That same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory.”
—Zachary Davis, “A Feast of Friendship”
Zion is not just a location on a map, but a way of relating to each other and to God: “And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them.”(Moses 7:18) … We, too, look toward Zion and yearn for a time when we as a people can “have our hearts be knit together in unity and in love towards one another.”(Mosiah 18:21) We suggest three guiding principles or practices from our field of psychology that can lead us toward Zion: proximity, empathic listening, and humility. As we focus our minds and hearts on the people of Zion, Zion becomes a way of being.
—Ben Ogles & M. Esperanza Dotto, “Facing Zion”
Jesus Christ is “the King of Zion.”
A kingdom that doesn’t look like a kingdom—this is Jesus’ favorite subject, or we might say, his favorite gag. And mirth is part of the point. Think of how he describes the kingdom as filled with little children, how he dubs James and John the “Sons of Thunder,” or how he dresses the Prodigal Son, foul-smelling and dirty, in his father’s best robe.
—James Egan, “Laughing with Jesus”
As Latter-day Saints, we believe that we will build Zion by consecrating ordinary things to the Kingdom of God—including our ordinary selves. The Kingdom is not a holy place that we find or inherit. It is an ordinary place that we make holy through our constant attention to the purpose of our existence. Our ordinary planet will become a paradise, and ordinary people will become like God. This, too, will be ordinary in the original sense of the word; it is the state of existence that has been ordained since the foundations of the world. The Zion we build will be the culmination of ordinariness, which will become a thing of great beauty and eternal wonder.
—Michael Austin, “Immanent Grace”
To change your mind—to repent—is to see this worth and potential. It is to see that everyone is a child of God. It’s to see a world where each person is deserving of forgiveness, a world where even our enemies are worthy of love, a world where we have the capacity to extend grace to all people just as God lovingly sends rain and sun on all people. This is the good news of the kingdom, a kingdom where, unlike the gospel of Augustus, everyone is a brother and a sister, independent of worldly status.
—Jon Ogden, “Finding the Gospel by Seeing Differently”
God weeps—and rejoices—for His children.
I believe that the Son and the Father weep because they refuse to look away from evil. They choose to share in our suffering. When Enoch questioned the Father for weeping, the Father asked him to look, really look, at man’s inhumanity to man. And Enoch “looked upon [the people’s] wickedness, and their misery, and wept” (Moses 7:41). Enoch had been preoccupied with the salvation of his own community. So preoccupied, in fact, that he had succeeded in creating a Zion that God had lifted into heaven. Enoch’s efforts had raised the living. But the Father had to remind him of those who had been left behind, of those who still suffered down in the dirt. In the process, Enoch learned that God’s life was not a life without suffering, because God’s love was not confined to those who loved him. He realized that to love like God meant to suffer like God.
—Jordan Watkins, “Suffering Towards Godliness”
In the Pearl of Great Price, the Lord shows Enoch a vision of “all the doings of the children of men” (Moses 7: 41). The vision is well known for its image of a God who weeps, the Restoration’s response to the question of divine passibility. There is something spiritually sobering about the fact that God’s divine nature does not spare him suffering, that part of what makes him divine is his capacity for suffering. And God’s emotional experience seems contagious to those who draw near him. In Enoch’s vision, there’s a lot of “sorrow, grief, [and] anguish” to go around.2 Indeed, multiple Restoration scriptures depict the cosmos as necessarily suffused with suffering (for example, see 2 Nephi 2:11). Why is this?
One reason may be that suffering eschews the superficial. Consider that God’s weeping over his children’s (mis)use of their agency causes Enoch to weep and stretch forth his arms. We also witness that Enoch’s “heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned; and all eternity shook” (Moses 7: 41). These are powerful, poetic metaphors for spiritual growing pains. Enoch learns in an embodied way that increased light and knowledge come at the cost of suffering (see Ecclesiastes 1:18).
Suffering in this sense has nothing to do with pain for pain’s sake. It is rather more akin to compassion (from the Latin compati, to bear or suffer with). Suffering as I mean it here would combine both (1) Lehi’s reaction to his vision—he “cast himself upon his bed” because he was so “overcome with the Spirit and the things which he had seen” (1 Nephi 1:7), and (2) the pillars of Alma’s covenant community, including a willingness to help others bear their burdens (see Mosiah 18). This is the kind of suffering the Savior referred to when he declared that “all these things shall give [us] experience, and shall be for [our] good” (D&C 122:7), and when He gave the injunction to “succor the weak, lift up the hands which hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees” (D&C 81:5).
—Ryan Davis, “Hie to Kolob”
[Joseph Smith] gives us the Book of Moses as a kind of an addendum, but also kind of corrective to many of the incorrect definitions, descriptions of God and his interactions that take place in the Bible.
… I and Fiona think that Moses 7 was given by direct revelation in our day in the context of trying to correct the damage done to the plain and precious truths, and so it has a higher place in our canon of inspired writ.
And so for us, the God who weeps with us and sorrows with us is the standard by which we evaluate what we think are some less than inspired depictions in scriptures.
—Terryl Givens, “So Who Wrote the Bible?”
Two figures emerge from the fire, one of whom calls the young boy by his personal name—Joseph. In the articulation of his name, the shaken boy hears himself called by a divine voice of absolute love—a voice which never anger speaks, nor malice, unkindness, disrespect, judgment, nor blame—for God is incapable of feeling anything but absolute love toward the children struggling to gain a foothold on this bewildering planet. The voice uttering words of peace, joy, gentleness, kindness, and solace to Joseph and to each one of us, is the voice of God Almighty.
Joseph walked into the grove to address a God sometimes described as vengeful and violent in the biblical text and in Milton. The God he encountered, however, was full of love and compassion and mercy—just like His Son. This changed the entire trajectory of Joseph’s life, I believe. As a result of this encounter Joseph wrote that it was absolutely imperative that each one of us obtain “a correct idea of God’s character, perfection, and attributes.”
—Fiona Givens, “Can we trust and worship the wrathful God of scripture?”
God wants us to be “of one heart and one mind.”
Today our conflicts and divisions are wide and varied. Religious vs. secular, believers vs doubters, right vs. left, old vs. young, etc. There’s a strong pull to choose your team and create purity tests—to claim that those who don’t agree with you are a “them” and that only those who are on your team are pure.
But when you see yourself and others fully, you realize that there ultimately are no teams. “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either,” writes Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.” There is only endless complexity unfolding inside and between each of us, an ever-shifting blend of good and bad—a hope for a brighter future together.
—Jon Ogden, “There Are No Teams”
We have been called to bring forth Zion, to become “of one heart and one mind.” I don’t believe that means that we think or feel in exactly the same way, but rather we live the truth that the flourishing of one requires the flourishing of all, that we are each beloved members of God’s family, and that we are each wrapped up in the great shared story of Christ’s redemption. When we join our hands together, we can build a new City of Holiness, and in the process, find our “hearts knit together in unity and in love one towards another.”
—Zachary Davis, “The Divided Mind”
The city of Enoch in the Book of Moses built a Zion community by being of “one heart and one mind” (Moses 7:18). The latter-day project of Zion began with the Lord’s command for everyone to “esteem his brother as himself” (D&C 38:24). To esteem is to respect, and the process of becoming of “one heart and one mind” begins with respecting those who differ from us. By virtue of God’s gift of agency, we are inclined to individuate and diversify. In carving out our own identities, we are engaging in the preliminary work of oneness. We need to be different so that we can choose to be one. Respect for others’ differences within the walls of Zion creates unity, not uniformity.
—Hanna Anderson Ringger, “Oil and Vinegar: The Role of Friction in Forming Zion”
We err, I think, when we see the great commandments as prescriptive statements, as though loving God and our neighbors were the purchase price of eternal salvation. The great commandments are not injunctions on how to qualify for heaven after we die, but instructions for how to build heaven while we are still on earth. The Kingdom of God is, by definition, a society in which everybody focuses their attention on God and each other—rather than on their own needs and desires. The overwhelming message of the New Testament is that we can have this society anytime we want it, but we cannot have it cheaply, because the only way to create it is to give up everything else.
—Michael Austin, “The Sacrament of Attention”
Heavenly Father wants me to choose to follow Him.
Jesus Christ will come again in the last days. Jesus will come back to earth.
The twin projects of Mormonism are Zion and exaltation. It’s about creating communities here on this earth in which there’s no male or female, or rich or poor, or bond or free, or Jew and Gentile; we’re all one in Christ… And, we’re never going to solve all the problems in this life. It is why we have a lively hope in life in Christ after we die. It is why we look forward to the resurrection because we know that that’s when Christ will wipe away all our tears. And so we keep Zion and exaltation together, and we do both projects at the same time.
—Patrick Mason, “Who is the Church for?”
Moses 7 presents the consummation of the Godhead’s grand design for the universe: “We will receive them into our bosom and they shall see us; and we will fall upon their necks and they shall fall upon our necks, and we will kiss each other; And there shall be mine abode, and it shall be Zion, which shall come forth out of all the creations which I have made” (Moses 7:63–64). This moment of climactic (re)unification captures the ultimate achievement for which Christ labors, a community fully integrated in love and harmony, bound to each other and to their God, after a harrowing but educative journey through mortality. Zion is the goal toward which humankind, in collaboration with the Godhead, is striving. All humanity—having been battered and bruised psychologically, emotionally, and physically during their mortal sojourn—are made whole through the atonement. Zion is the concrete manifestation of a universal at-one-ment eventuating in a new world, immersed in the light of the Holy Spirit.
—Fiona Givens, “Atonement, Vengeance & the Hope of Zion”