On January 13, shortly after watching the second half of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001 Film), I blogged about Sam risking his life to keep a promise he made to stay with Frodo. In that blog post, it was generally accepted that Sam is an exemplary person - faithful, loyal, brave, and (apart from his cruelty to Smeagol/Gollum) wholly and totally good. Today, I'd like to compare Sam to another exemplary person, who was, apart from nothing, wholly and totally good, and in fact, perfect.
While we watched the concluding half of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003 Film), I observed how Sam's devotion to Frodo mirrors Christ's devotion to us. First of all, He risked and in fact gave His life to help us, perhaps partly because, in the pre-mortal council, He promised that He would.
Yet, Sam was not with Frodo at the beginning of the second half of the film. Why not? Because Frodo asked Sam to leave. No matter how much God and Christ want to help us, they will accept our wishes and stay out of our lives (for the most part), if we want them to. They won't stay where they aren't welcome. If we ask Them to leave, They will.
But for our sakes, They won't go far. After leaving Sam, Frodo got captured by Shelob, a giant spider. (We won't go into the analogy of who or what Shelob might represent, partly because it's too obvious and partly because it'd distract us too much from Sam.) Fortunately for Frodo, Sam appeared and, despite being several times smaller than Shelob and having very little training in combat, he miraculously managed to fight the spider off. Similarly, though we may drive Christ out of our lives, I think He will stay close enough that He can still watch over us and work miracles for us, because no matter what we do or say, He still loves us.
After fighting of Shelob, Sam rushed to Frodo's side and was crushed to discover that Frodo was apparently dead. Through his tears, he said to Frodo, "Don't go where I can't follow." Because some blessings are reserved for the righteous and because the spirit of God can't linger in spiritually dark places, there are situations we can put ourselves in where Jesus can't help us, as much as He'd like to. If we yield to temptation and fall into sin, there's not much that Jesus Christ can do for us but encourage us to make the effort to return.
Our effort is essential in this because, as noted before, He respects our wishes. If we choose to fall into the trap of sin, He's not going to pulls us out of it unless we show that we want Him to. Because of that, no matter how much Christ loves us and wants to help us, He needs us to try to repent in order for His Atonement to benefit us. In a similar way, there was a final moment where Frodo was hanging from a cliff over lava and Sam couldn't quite reach to pull him up. He needed Frodo to reach up and take his hand. It seems that Frodo was tempted to let go, just as we all are when things get really hard, because Sam felt the need to tell him, "Don't you let go. Don't let go."
Both Sam and our Savior made tremendous sacrifices to help the ones that they cared about, yet it's up to us to decide whether His sacrifice saves us or whether we let it go to waste. Frodo could have given up and let go. It would have been much easier, and yet much much painful for him and for the people who loved him. But to his credit, and to show a good example for us, Frodo reached up, took his gardener's hand, and was saved. Similarly, we need to reach up and take our Savior's hand, or everything He has done for us would have been done in vain.
This isn't the first time I drew a symbol of Christ out of a Lord of the Rings movie, and it probably won't be the last. There are many good symbols and messages in those movies, and I can't hope to catch them all or do them justice on my blog. I'd recommend watching them yourselves and seeing what images and symbols stand out to you, but there are two things wrong with that; Not everyone has the Lord of the Rings trilogy in their movie libraries, and even if you did, it would take you somewhere from nine to twelve hours to watch them all. In the case of my family, we watched the trilogy half a movie at a time and it took us at least two months. You may be better of re-watching General Conference. Though I have to say, General Conference isn't anywhere near as exciting or entertaining as the Lord of the Rings.
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