The Bread of Justice and the Waters of Mercy

When we partake of the Sacrament, we are offered both bread and water. In order to fully participate in the ordinance, we must take both the bread and the water. The prayers for the bread and for the water are very similar, but there are important differences. In both prayers we are promised that if we will always remember Jesus Christ, we may have His Spirit to be with us, but in the prayer on the bread, receiving His Spirit is also conditional on us keeping the Commandments, whereas the prayer on the water has no such additional stipulation. Just as the Sacrament is composed of two elements - the bread and the water - God's forgiveness is composed of two elements as well: Justice and Mercy. Justice demands exact obedience. Mercy accepts all of our well-intentioned efforts. Justice requires pure perfection. Mercy acknowledges that perfection is not yet attainable and that, for right now, good is good enough. When we are attempting to reconcile ourselves to our Heavenly Father, we sometimes want to focus only on Justice, or only on Mercy. In effect, as part of our repentance process, we want to only take the bread, or only take the water. We may sometimes feel that we are undeserving of God's Mercy. By the sweat of our faces we intend to earn our Bread of Justice. We think that after all we can do, we either won't even need grace at all or we will never qualify for it no matter what, and we will somehow be saved or damned in spite of God's Mercy. On the flip side, we sometimes may believe that since Christ has already paid for any and all sins that we could possibly commit, since His love is deeper than Hell and Higher than heaven and wider than eternity, then we don't really need to trouble ourselves overmuch with the Repentance process, because God will not abandon us in Hell to be damned for all eternity. Such eat, drink and be merry attitudes deny God's justice and they rob us from any hope we might have for agency and self-improvement. We are children of God living in a Fallen world. As God's children we have an innate desire for perfection. As inhabitants of a Fallen World, we will never reach that perfection in this life. Our spirits chafe at the imperfection by which we are surrounded. That spark of Divinity within us demands perfect Justice and judges ourselves harshly when we fail to attain it. However, that same spark of Divinity also radiates the pure love of Christ, and reminds us that however much God hates the sin, He will always love the sinner. Just as He told the woman taken in adultery, Jesus Christ does not condemn us for failing to be perfect. That is Mercy. But just like He told her to go and sin no more, as often as we come unto Him, Jesus Christ will remind us that even though He does not condemn us, He expects us to go and sin no more. That is Justice. Christ is the great Mediator. He can simultaneously demand perfection and accept imperfect efforts. He offers both loving correction and loving encouragement. He knows that we struggle constantly with yielding to the Spirit or to our natural tendencies. He knows that in this confusion, we often try to take our sense of justice to the extreme, and thus rob mercy, or else rely so heavily on mercy that it robs justice. He knows that sometimes we get so discouraged with trying and failing to be perfect that we want to skip over the Bread of Justice and take a double helping of mercy instead. And He knows that sometimes we are so wracked with guilt that we can't bring ourselves to drink of the waters of mercy even though we are choking from thirst and He offers it freely. With His help we can navigate the middle course, relying on both Justice and Mercy, partaking of both the Bread and the Water, going and sinning no more, confident that we have not been condemned, trusting that, in this life or the next, both Justice and Mercy will be completely reconciled and we will once more be children of a Perfect Being living at last in a Perfect world.