The Lord Working With Them

The last sentence of Mark

The Gospel of Mark — the fastest, sparest of the four — ends its whole account of the Son of God with one sentence about what happened after he ascended:

"And they went forth, and preached every where, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following. Amen" (Mark 16:20).

That is the final verse: the risen Lord enthroned at the right hand of God in the verse before — and then immediately back on the job, working alongside the people he just left. And in the Greek, the sentence's whole engine is a single word: the Lord working with them is synergountos — from syn, "together with," and ergon, "work." To work together. It is the word from which English gets synergy — our modern term for the whole becoming greater than the sum of its parts descends directly from the New Testament's word for what the Lord does with his disciples' labor. And Paul made its noun form a job title — synergos, "fellow-worker" — spending it on Timothy, Titus, Priscilla and Aquila, and then, in the two most astonishing uses, on all of us: "For we are labourers together with God" (1 Corinthians 3:9 — literally God's synergoi); "we then, as workers together with him..." (2 Corinthians 6:1). Even providence gets the verb: "all things work together for good" (Romans 8:28) is panta synergei — all things synergize for them that love God.

One small grammar note, because the verse's structure is itself a sermon. "Working with" and "following" are both participles — ongoing-action words — and they hold the sentence up between them: the Lord co-working ahead, the signs co-following behind, and the preaching walking in the middle. The church's whole outward life, in Mark's closing grammar, is a formation: cooperation above, confirmation behind. This essay is about that formation — and about the question it answers, which our other essays have raised and left standing: if all our works are dead, what makes any of them live?

What quickens a dead work

Because our works are dead — we have said it across three series and the scriptures say it flat: "dead works" (Hebrews 9:14), output a corpse can produce, skin without breath, webs that never become garments. The gift given grudgingly is "counted the same as if he had retained the gift"; the maximum-effort servant is still "unprofitable." Nothing we produce carries life in itself.

So what changes? Mark 16:20 answers with its participle: the works live when the Lord is working in them with you. Not works done for God — the whole dead-works pile is works done for God, delivered to him like invoices; and not works God does instead of us — he routes almost nothing around human hands. Works done with God: co-labored, jointly held, his life running through the shared task the way blood runs through a working muscle — that is the third category, the living one, and it is the only one scripture ever promises anything about. Ezekiel's transplant sequence already told us the mechanism from the inside — new heart, his Spirit within, "and I will cause you to walk in my statutes": caused works, pumped rather than pushed. Mark 16:20 shows the same mechanism from the outside: the disciples go forth, the Lord synergizes, and the works come alive — with the signs following as the vital signs, warmth off a body that has life in it because the Living One is in it. And James, of all writers, uses the very word to settle the oldest argument in Christendom: "Seest thou how faith wrought with his works" — synērgei, faith synergizing with works — "and by works was faith made perfect" (James 2:22). Faith and works were never rivals to be ranked. They are yoke-fellows — the inner wanting and the outer doing, co-laboring — and a work is alive precisely when that inner partner, and the Lord behind it, are pulling in the harness with the hands.

Here, then, is the whole doctrine of works in one line: a work is dead or alive depending on who is working it with you. Alone, the grandest labor is taxidermy. Co-worked, the smallest is a miracle in embryo — because the question was never the size of the work. It was the company.

There am I in the midst

And the Lord told us, precisely, where he keeps that company — in the charter verse of every companionship, presidency, marriage, and gathered pair in his kingdom:

"Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matthew 18:19–20).

Read the terms of the promise carefully, because they are strange and wonderful. The presence is not pledged to the crowd, the program, or the solitary giant. It is pledged to the gathered small number — two or three — on two conditions: gathered in his name, and in agreement. And the Greek behind "agree" is a gift to everything this project has built: symphōnēsōsin — to be a symphony, to sound together. If two of you shall symphonize on earth — the tuned pair, in tune and in time — the Father acts, and the Son is in the midst. There is the doctrine of Zion at its minimum viable scale: the smallest possible orchestra is two instruments and the Composer standing between them, and heaven's whole attention is promised to exactly that ensemble. It is why the fire of Pentecost fell on a room "with one accord," why the prison fire encircled two praying men, why the church's every governing body is a council — because the presence, which is the life, which is what quickens the dead work, has a stated address: the midst of the agreed and gathered. A soul working alone is not abandoned — but a pair working agreed is accompanied by covenant, and the difference is the difference this essay is about.

Magnified

Now do the mathematics of what his midst-presence does to a work, because the scriptures keep insisting the arithmetic breaks.

Five loaves, two fish, one boy's lunch — passed into the co-working hands — feed five thousand, with twelve baskets over: the leftovers exceeding the inputs. The widow's cruse of oil "failed not" — flowing exactly as long as she poured. The widow with the pot of oil and the borrowed vessels: the oil ran until the vessels ran out — the supply limited only by the containers brought (2 Kings 4:6). In every case the human contribution is real and required — the lunch, the pouring, the borrowed jars — and in every case the output stands in no sane proportion to it, because a second Worker was in the work. And the restored scriptures have a word for this, and once you hear it in this light you will never hear it the same way in a sustaining again: magnify. "Whoso is faithful unto the obtaining these two priesthoods... and the magnifying their calling, are sanctified by the Spirit" (D&C 84:33); Jacob and Joseph "did magnify our office unto the Lord" (Jacob 1:19). We usually read "magnify your calling" as try harder at it — but a magnifying glass does not try harder; it is an ordinary lens through which light does extraordinary things. A calling is magnified when the Lord's working-with passes through it — the human effort real, the enlargement his — five loaves' worth of home teaching becoming, somehow, a family's turning point; a fumbling lesson landing in one heart like fire; the ordinary member's ordinary labor producing "that which is greater than the sum," which is simply synergy, wearing its Sunday name. The instruction was never "be impressive." It was: be a clean lens, in the harness, in agreement — and watch what the light does.

Two by two

Which explains, at last, the Lord's strangest staffing decision — one so consistent that we stop noticing how inefficient it is.

"And he called unto him the twelve, and began to send them forth by two and two" (Mark 6:7). Later, the larger wave: "the Lord appointed other seventy also, and sent them two and two before his face into every city and place, whither he himself would come" (Luke 10:1). By every managerial logic this halves your coverage — twelve preachers reach twelve towns; six pairs reach six. He paid the inefficiency on purpose, every time, and the reasons are this essay's whole cargo stacked together. The pair satisfies the ancient witness law — "in the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established" (Deuteronomy 19:15; 2 Corinthians 13:1): a lone voice is a claim; a pair is a testimony, legally formed, walking. The pair is the minimum gathering the Matthew 18 promise attaches to — send them alone and you send them; send them by twos, agreed, in his name, and you send him with them: which is exactly what Luke's sentence says, in a clause that should take the breath — sent "two and two before his face... whither he himself would come." The pairs are the advance party of the Presence; every companionship precedes an arrival; the two knock on the door so that He can enter the house. And the Preacher had counted the whole arithmetic a thousand years early: "Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth... and a threefold cord is not quickly broken" (Ecclesiastes 4:9–12). Two are better — and the cord that cannot be broken has three strands: the pair, and the One in the midst of them, braided in by the agreement itself. That is what a missionary companionship actually is, and a ministering pair, and a presidency — and it is what a marriage is first of all: the original two-by-two, sent out before his face, into the one small city of a home whither he himself would come.

So the last sentence of Mark turns out to be the church's whole operating manual, folded small: go forth — not alone; agreed, in his name, two by two; your works dead as clay in your own hands and alive the moment the Potter's hands close over them in the harness; his presence in the midst as the life, his magnification as the mathematics, and the signs following behind the formation like a wake — not produced, never chased, simply trailing, the way warmth trails a body and evidence trails a fact. The verse has one more mercy in it, and it is the quietest: the word is working — present tense, a participle, ongoing. Mark did not write that the Lord worked with them, once, in the apostolic age. He wrote the Lord working — and grammar has no expiration date. The harness is still warm. The midst is still occupied wherever two agree. And every dead work you will ever offer is one Companion away from being alive.

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And they went forth, and preached every where, the Lord working with them.