Myrrh

The letter with nothing against it

The engagement season is sweet. Then comes the season that proves it.

The second of the seven letters goes to Smyrna, and it is unlike any of the others in two ways. It is the shortest. And it contains no rebuke — nothing corrected, nothing held against them, not one "nevertheless." Ephesus, remember, got the commendation plaque and then the knife. Smyrna gets pure tenderness: "I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich)" (Revelation 2:9).

And then — to this church he has nothing against — the Lord says the sentence you'd expect him to say to the one he was punishing: "Behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days" (2:10).

Sit with the strangeness of that. The faultless congregation is the suffering one. The bride who has done nothing wrong is the one headed to prison. Every believer who has ever kept the covenant and been crushed anyway — every soul who has quietly wondered what did I do to deserve this? — is standing at Smyrna's gate, and the letter's first mercy is its arithmetic of blame: there is none. Suffering, at this station, is not a verdict. It is a station — a scheduled stop on the bridal road, with its own name, its own gift, and its own crown. The whole letter is the Bridegroom preparing his beloved for it: "Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer" (2:10). Not "you will not suffer." Fear none of it — because I know what it is for, and I will be there, and I have been there first: the letter opens with his credentials for this exact station, "these things saith the first and the last, which was dead, and is alive" (2:8).

The city named for a burial spice

And here the station's name stops being background and becomes the sermon — because this one requires no old preacher's dictionary. Smyrna is simply the Greek word for myrrh. The suffering church lives in a city named for the bitterest, most fragrant substance in scripture.

Follow myrrh through the Bible and you find it at every threshold of love and loss. It arrives at the birth — the magi's third gift, laid beside a manger. It is the chief ingredient of the holy anointing oil (Exodus 30:23) — the oil that made priests priests and kings kings; the very word Messiah means the Anointed, and myrrh is in the anointing. It drenches the wedding — the Song of Solomon is practically perfumed with it: "a bundle of myrrh is my wellbeloved unto me"; the bridegroom comes up from the wilderness "perfumed with myrrh"; his very hands drip "sweet smelling myrrh" on the handles of the lock (Song 1:13; 3:6; 5:5). And it wraps the burial — Nicodemus brought a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to wind into the linen (John 19:39). Birth gift, anointing oil, wedding perfume, burial spice: one substance, spanning the Beloved's whole mortal story — as if heaven wanted us to learn early that these are not different smells.

Because here is what myrrh is: the resin of a thorny desert tree that only flows when the bark is wounded. The tree is cut, and it bleeds; the bleeding hardens into bitter droplets — the Hebrew word, mor, comes from the root for bitterness itself, the same root Naomi reached for in her grief: "call me Mara" (Ruth 1:20). And then the bitter hardened tears, crushed and burned and pressed into oil, release one of the sweetest fragrances the ancient world knew. That is the entire theology of the second station in one plant: sorrow, offered, becomes fragrance. The wound is where the perfume comes from. The death-spice and the wedding-scent were always the same substance — at two temperatures.

The bride's six months

Now bring the betrothal forward, because myrrh has a specific job in a wedding — and scripture shows it to us in the story of a bride being prepared for a king.

Before Esther could be presented to the king, the law of the house required a full year of preparation: "six months with oil of myrrh, and six months with sweet odours" (Esther 2:12). Six months of myrrh — half the bridal preparation was the bitter oil. Not punishment; purification: the treatment that readied a girl to stand in the throne room, worked into her until the fragrance was not something she wore but something she was. And Esther's own story tells you what the myrrh-months produce, because when her ten-days moment came — the decree, the fast, the unsummoned walk to the throne — the girl who had been steeped in bitterness said the bravest wedding-vow in the Old Testament: "so will I go in unto the king... and if I perish, I perish" (4:16). Faithful unto death. The myrrh had done its work.

This is the station where the engagement's vows meet their content. Every wedding has the words in it — for poorer, in sickness, till death — and everyone says them in sunshine, perfumed and surrounded by cake. Smyrna is where the Bridegroom's beloved actually walks them: for poorer — "I know thy poverty (but thou art rich)": the engaged heart is poor in Smyrna's markets and rich beyond audit in her Beloved's house, betrothed to the heir of everything. In sickness, in prison, in tribulation — the ten days, endured not as abandonment but as the myrrh-months, the bitter half of the preparation. Unto death — and here the letter quietly rewrites the world's vow, because the world's marriages end at that clause: till death us do part. Listen to Smyrna's version: "be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life" (2:10). Not parted at death — crowned past it. This Bridegroom's covenant is the one death does not dissolve; the vow runs through the grave and out the other side wearing a crown, because the One administering it "was dead, and is alive." The pressing is not the end of the marriage. It is the last fitting before the coronation.

Fear — the shadow at this station

Every station's pitfall, we learned at the door, is a thread of the veil — the depth itself, refused. And the depth of Smyrna is faithful suffering; so its shadow is not the suffering. It is the fear of it.

Notice that "fear none of those things" is the letter's only actual instruction. Not endure — Smyrna was already enduring. Not repent — there was nothing to repent of. Just: do not be afraid. Because fear is the one thing that can undo this station from the inside — the flinch that denies before the rooster crows, that softens the testimony to dodge the tribunal, that would rather be spared than sanctified. And the book of Revelation takes fear more seriously than we do: when it lists, at the very end, those who cannot enter the city, the list begins not with murderers, not with liars — "but the fearful, and unbelieving..." (21:8). The fearful, first. Not because timid souls are wicked, but because fear is the refusal of station two — and everything untrue flows downstream from that refusal: the denial, the compromise, the quiet treasons all have fear as their headwater.

And now you know why the spine verse of this whole series says what it says. "Strip yourselves from jealousies and fears... and the veil shall be rent" (D&C 67:10). Fear is named, by the Lord, as veil-fabric — this station is that verse's home ground. And scripture's saddest case study is a whole bride who wore it: Israel at Sinai, brought by Moses to the mountain to meet the Bridegroom face to face — the original wedding, offered — "but they hardened their hearts, and could not endure his presence" (D&C 84:23–24). Could not endure his presence — not because God withheld, but because they feared; they sent Moses up alone and asked that God not speak to them anymore, and the veil that fell over that generation was woven on the spot, out of exactly this station's shadow. The bride who fears the myrrh postpones the wedding. Every time.

The anchor already through the veil

But how does anyone not fear, in the actual ten days — in the diagnosis, the empty chair, the prison of whatever kind, when heaven is quiet and the pressing is real and the face this whole road promises is precisely what you cannot yet see?

The letter to the Hebrews answers with the most beautiful nautical image in scripture, and it belongs to this station like it was written for it: "which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil; whither the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus" (Hebrews 6:19–20).

Read it slowly. Your hope is an anchor — and the anchor is not down in your storm. It is through the veil, already, set on the far side, in the throne room itself, gripping ground that no weather on this side can reach. And it holds because Someone carried it there: the Forerunner — the one who runs ahead — entered for us, and the line between you and that anchor is taut right now, in the middle of your ten days, whether you can feel the pull or not. This is the doctrine for everyone at Smyrna who seeks and does not yet see: you are not holding on to the veil's near side by your grip. You are moored to its far side by his. The storm can toss the boat. It cannot move the anchor, because the anchor isn't in the storm.

The blank check, and the seer's price

And this is the station where our two mountain pilgrims teach the road's hardest lessons — trust before sight, and sight's true cost.

Remember the brother of Jared's examination at the veil: "Believest thou the words which I shall speak?" (Ether 3:11) — words not yet spoken, a blank check signed on character alone: "Yea, Lord... for thou art a God of truth, and canst not lie." That is Smyrna's epistemology exactly. In the ten days, God's next words are always still unspoken — the outcome unrevealed, the why withheld — and the only faith that survives the interval is the kind anchored to who he is rather than to what he has so far explained. Moroni, who knew pressing, wrote its timing rule from inside his own: "ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith" (Ether 12:6). After. The witness is real, and it is scheduled, and its schedule is downstream of the myrrh — which is not cruelty but chemistry: the fragrance cannot be released before the crushing, because the fragrance is in the crushing.

And Nephi, the other pilgrim, teaches this station's soberest truth: the summit itself has a price. His great vision — the tree, the condescension, all things to the end of the world — included watching his own descendants dwindle and perish; he came down from the mountain grieved, and the wound surfaces in his psalm decades later. To see all things includes seeing the bitter things. John, who wrote our seven letters, was handed the same terms on Patmos: the little book "in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter" (Revelation 10:10). Sweet in the mouth, bitter in the belly — revelation's honest label, printed right on the scroll. Ask for the summit knowing the summit shows everything. The seers all carry myrrh. It is, quite literally, in the anointing.

The arithmetic of the crown

So gather the station's arithmetic, because the Bridegroom did the math out loud to steady his beloved:

The tribulation is ten days — bounded, counted, temporary; the same span Daniel's four faithful were tested, and came out fairer. The crown is life — unbounded, unending. The poverty is local; the riches are already yours by betrothal. And the overcomer's promise is a subtraction that removes the only thing on earth actually worth fearing: "he that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death" (2:11). The first death — the one the ten days threaten — turns out to be the door the Forerunner already holds; the second death — real separation — cannot touch you here at all. Which means the fearful math and the faithful math use the same numbers and get opposite answers: fear counts ten days and calls it everything; faith counts the crown and calls the ten days a fitting.

And on the far side of the myrrh-months, the bride comes up out of the wilderness like the one in the Song — "perfumed with myrrh," the bitterness turned to fragrance on her — and receives the next station's gift, and it is exactly what a bride receives when the preparation is complete and the union is sealed: a new name. "To him that overcometh will I give... a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it" (2:17).

The name — the stone — and the hidden manna: that is where we go next.

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Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.