This is my opening parable to Talk #6.
The Work is Not Yet Done
by Neal Silvester
In the final installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, the character of Bruce Wayne is thrown into a prison at the bottom of a huge pit. The prisoners try again and again to climb out, but fail and fall every time. The idea of the prison is to induce true despair in its occupants, for, as the villain Bane tells Bruce Wayne, true despair must include some form of hope, hope that is never fulfilled, but constantly yearning. To add to this darkness, Bruce Wayne has severe injuries that preclude his ability to climb out of the pit. He lies broken at the bottom with several other prisoners, all whom have no real hope to ever escape.
And so Bruce Wayne takes it upon himself to rise up, to recover from his injuries and train his body to be able to climb out of the pit. After months of effort and failed attempts, he finally manages to do it. The key to this analogy is what happens next: as Bruce reaches the top and looks around, there on the edge of the pit is a rope. He almost casually tosses the rope down, thus giving the prisoners, who had no chance to escape on their own, the opportunity to be free.
Do you see the analogy, brothers and sisters? In this situation Bruce Wayne takes the role of Christ, conquering that formerly unbeatable foe of Death, thus opening the way for others to follow after, to be resurrected as He was. Both Bruce Wayne and Jesus Christ, by going first, built a bridge to liberate the captives of darkness and despair.
But there is another way to apply this scenario, similar but more applicable to us. It is descriptive of temple work, and the way each of us as Latter-day Saints can be like Christ, “saviors on Mount Zion” (Obadiah 1:21). We can perform, by proxy, saving and exalting ordinances for our dead, thus giving them the opportunity to go where they hadn’t been able to before. And thus the prisoners Alma the Younger told his son Corianton about in Alma 40 can cross that bridge and enter paradise, the presence of God. Keep this analogy and image in mind as we go through the rest of this talk.
2 Nephi 29:9 reads, “My work is not yet finished; neither shall it be until the end of man.” The Savior tells us quite plainly in this verse that His work is not yet done, and it won’t be until the era that He calls “the end of man.” We will return to that line later; for now I’d like to concentrate on what the first part means. His work is not finished. It wasn’t finished thousands of years ago when that verse was written, and it certainly is not finished yet, as clearly man has not ended.
So we have a question. What is the Savior’s work? It could be adequately summed up as the threefold mission of the Church --- Proclaim the Gospel, Perfect the Saints, and Redeem the Dead. But to what end is that work? What is it ultimately designed to accomplish? Gospel scholar Truman Madsen stated that the work is “to eventually prepare the whole world, every man and every woman, for temples and the privilege of communing with the living God” (29). In other words, to prepare to enter into and dwell in the presence of God. There is no doubt, brothers and sisters, that this is accomplished no more effectively and profoundly than in the holy temple.
