The Wedding Day

The day

The last letter ended with a knock, and the very next verse of the book answers it: "After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven" (Revelation 4:1). He knocks at ours; then he opens his. And when John's vision finally climbs to its summit, the sound coming through that open door is not a trumpet or a verdict. It is bells — the roar of a wedding morning:

"Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready" (Revelation 19:6–7).

Hath made herself ready. Hold that reflexive, because it is the whole road's freedom gathered into one clause: her consent, her preparation, her unforced yes — seven stations of it, none compelled, every station a wanting. And her gown is revealed as what the fifth station was weaving all along: "to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints" (19:8). Granted — given, from the King's closet — and yet genuinely hers: every hidden kindness of the long betrothal, worn at last in the light. The Bridegroom rides out under the name he was earning at every station where we were faithless and he was not: "Faithful and True" (19:11). And the supper is called by its true name forever: "Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb" (19:9) — the fourth cup, lifted at last; the pause of two thousand years of sacraments, ended.

But before the city and the throne and the great descending, this essay has to begin where the wedding actually began — because the marriage of the Lamb did not start with trumpets. It started at dawn, in a garden, with one weeping woman who thought she was talking to the groundskeeper.

The garden, first

On Friday afternoon, at the ninth hour, the veil of the temple tore from the top to the bottom over a finished offering. And the first human being to meet what came through that opening was not a priest, not a king, not even an apostle. It was Mary Magdalene, before sunrise on Sunday, standing at a tomb with her eyes so full of grief that she could not recognize the risen Lord of the world standing in front of her. She saw the stone moved and thought theft. She saw angels and barely paused. She saw him and "supposed him to be the gardener" (John 20:15).

And then he said one word.

"Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni" (John 20:16).

The veil, for her, rent on a name. Not on evidence — the evidence was all around her and she had walked past every piece of it. On her name, in his voice — the name by which he shall call you, Benjamin said; the voice the friend of the Bridegroom rejoices to hear; the white stone's whole doctrine, performed at dawn on the first morning of the new creation. The first face through the rent veil met a bride, and called her by name, and she knew him then — which has been the pattern at every threshold of this road, from a boy in a grove onward, and will be the pattern at yours.

And do not miss where it happened, because the setting is the oldest one we have: a garden — a woman, and God, walking in it. Eden, played again — except that in the first garden the humans hid from the voice, and in this one the woman is seeking it; in the first, God asked "where art thou?", and in this one he answers it — here, alive, at the door of a tomb that could not hold him. She reached for him, and he gave her instead the first errand of the opened veil: "go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God" (20:17). My Father and yours. The first message through the rent veil was a family announcement — and the first apostle of the resurrection was a woman running from a garden with a wedding to announce.

The last rending

Now name what the resurrection is, in this series' own terms — because it is the doctrine this whole road has been saving for its final mile.

We learned at the door that you are wearing the veil: the mortal body, the fabric of unrenewed nature, the curtain that came with birth. We learned that the rending is the renewing and sanctifying of mind and body — the fabric filled with light until it goes sheer. Then hear what the resurrection is: the final rending — and it does not remove the veil. It glorifies it. "This mortal must put on immortality" (1 Corinthians 15:53) — put on: wardrobe language; the fabric not torn away but transfigured. The body — the veil you wore through every station — rises luminous, incorruptible, the curtain become the wedding garment. That is why the greatest faith in scripture was rewarded, at its summit, with a revelation about embodiment: "this body, which ye now behold, is the body of my spirit... and even as I appear unto thee to be in the spirit will I appear unto my people in the flesh" (Ether 3:16). Flesh was the destination all along — the prize, never the prison; which is the whole difference between the gospel and every philosophy that ever tried to escape the body. The Greeks wanted out of the veil. The gospel always intended the veil glorified.

And the risen Lord kept the proof on his hands. Of everything a resurrected body might have shed, he kept the wounds — showed them to Thomas, stood at Bountiful while a whole nation felt them one by one — because the wounds are the tokens by which the Bridegroom is known at every door, the marks of the price that opened it. And the wedding city answers his wounds with its own architecture, in the most tender detail of John's whole vision: "the twelve gates were twelve pearls; every several gate was of one pearl" (Revelation 21:21). Think of what a pearl is: it is the one gem made by a wound — an injury inside a living creature, wrapped in patience, layer over layer, until the hurt itself becomes the treasure. Every entrance into the city of God is a healed wound, made glorious, made door. Of course it is. You enter the wedding the same way the Bridegroom entered it — through wounds that have become pearls — and every scar you carry up that road is, in the city's own building code, a future gate.

The bride is a city

Then the angel says the strangest, most wonderful sentence in the book: "Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the Lamb's wife" — and he shows John a city: "that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God" (21:9–10).

The bride is a city. Because that is what we have become, all the stations gathered — not a crowd of separate souls but a dwelling: a people fitted together, gates and streets and foundations, the whole family become a place where God can live. And walk its architecture, because every station of the road is built into it. The gates "shall not be shut at all" (21:25) — Philadelphia's open door, made permanent civic policy. The city is "pure gold, like unto clear glass" (21:18) — gold tried in the fire until transparent: Laodicea's prescription filled, the brother of Jared's molten stones become municipal material; a whole city refined past purity into transparency, nothing hidden, nothing opaque, the veil-fabric of an entire civilization gone sheer. Its light needs no sun, "for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof" (21:23) — the Morning Star, risen over everyone at once. Its name, this dispensation's revelations told us, is a city of refuge (D&C 45:66) — and the accuser is outside its jurisdiction forever: "there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that... maketh a lie" (21:27) — the weeds, at last, outside the gate; the field, finally and forever, clean.

And one absence in the city says more than all its architecture: "I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it" (21:22). No temple — because a temple is a pointing, a rehearsal, a house of the veil — and there is nothing left to point at when the Person is present. Every sacred pointing of the long road — the ordinances, the veils, the houses — was scaffolding for this: the union direct, the rehearsals graduated into the thing rehearsed.

Heaven comes down

And then the last surprise of the long betrothal — the one that undoes the geometry of the entire road, and it is announced with a great voice out of heaven:

"Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them... and God himself shall be with them" (21:3).

The city descends. We spent the whole road thinking we were traveling to him — seven stations, one long climb toward the veil — and at the altar we discover he was traveling to us: heaven comes down; the Bridegroom relocates; the wedding is held at the bride's place. It was always going to be — he is the one who descended below all things, the one who put on our veil-fabric in Bethlehem, the one who knocked at Laodicea from the outside of our door. The whole courtship, from Eden's "where art thou?" to the garden's "Mary," has been God closing the distance from his side faster than we ever closed it from ours.

And the first thing he does upon arriving is the single most intimate act in all of scripture: "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes" (21:4). His own hand. Every station's tears, named and dried: the Ephesian tears of love grown cold and found again; the Smyrnan tears of the pressing; the travail-tears of the labor; Sardis's tears of the honest hour before the mirror; the tears of everyone ever shut out by the accuser's assemblies; Mary's tears at the tomb, first of all of them. "And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away" (21:4). The two presses close. The myrrh's work is finished — and, exactly as that station promised, it finishes as fragrance.

Then he speaks over the whole scene, and the words he chooses are the ones our pilgrim has been carrying since the barges: "It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end" (21:6). The brother of Jared, remember, set one shining stone in each end of every vessel — bow and stern, light at the first and at the last, for every little family crossing the dark. That was never just clever marine engineering. It was the whole doctrine of the crossing, molten into a placement: the Light at both ends of every voyage — the same Lord at your embarkation and your landfall, and no mile of the furious middle outside his brightness. At the city he says it in the first person. He was the stone at both ends of your vessel the entire way.

Face to face

And so the terminus — the verse this whole series has been sailing toward, the last promise of the last chapter of the whole Bible:

"And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads" (Revelation 22:4).

The face: D&C 93:1 fulfilled — every soul that forsook and came and called and obeyed, now seeing and knowing. The name in the forehead: the helmet of salvation consummated, the white stone gone public, Philadelphia's triple inscription complete — identity, address, and belonging, worn openly forever. And Paul's great sentence closes the intimacy-station's arc with the verb the covenant always ended in: "now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (1 Corinthians 13:12). Know, even as known — the mutual, unveiled, whole-self knowing; the beholding law arrived at its destination, because you have become what you beheld, and the answer to Bountiful's question — what manner of men ought ye to be? — is now simply visible, in you, at the table: even as I am.

That is what the veil was for. Not a wall — a wedding garment on the face of the world, worn through the long betrothal, thinned by every believing, and lifted at the vow's completion the way veils have been lifted at weddings since weddings began: the last thin thing between two faces, removed — because the readiness it was protecting has finally, fully come.

The Spirit and the bride say, Come

And the first voice heard in the married house — the very last invitation in all of scripture — is not the Bridegroom's alone. Listen: "And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely" (22:17).

The wedding does not end the invitation. It staffs it. The married family's first recorded act is to hold the door for whoever is still on the road — at whatever station, in whatever shadow — because the supper has infinite seats and the water is free and the whole point of a family, we learned long ago on another road, is that it is in the business of bringing people home. If you have walked these nine essays and recognized your own station somewhere on the way — the cooled engagement, the ten days, the divided table, the marketed depths, the name outliving the life, the tired grip at the door, the estate that needs nothing — then hear the last word of the book as addressed to your exact address: Come. Not "climb." Not "qualify." Come — the appetite-verb, the desire-word, the only entrance requirement the road ever had.

One last grace, and then the road is yours. Moroni, closing the Book of Mormon, placed the brother of Jared's story — chronologically the first story, the oldest faith in the record — at the very end of the book, so that the volume finishes at its own beginning: the last full teaching before the farewell is the first man who could not be kept out, as if to say — this is how much can be seen, by anyone at all, who will believe the words He shall speak. The book's last lesson is its first pilgrim, so that its last reader can become its next.

So can this road. The stations are seven; the pilgrims went ahead; the Bridegroom is faithful; the oath is sworn; the veil is his patience, and it is thinning even now, and the door at the end of it has been unlocked from the far side since a Friday afternoon long ago. The wedding is real. And you are wanted at it — not as a guest.

As the Bride.

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And the Spirit and the bride say, Come... and whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.