Reading: Zechariah 9-14, Psalm 62
Zechariah wraps us his message in today’s reading with a somewhat less strange series of scenes, though they are by no means the simplest thing to understand. Having warned the people that their actions and motivations both matter, and reminded them that their purpose as the people of God is to serve as a witness and a kingdom of priests for the rest of humanity, he now moves to describing the coming days in which God will fulfill his promises to the house of Jacob whether or not they choose to be obedient.
We start with a series of oracles against the nations that have taken advantage of Israel while they were down. God wants his people to know that even through he has punished them, those nations that abused them will also face justice. Then we move to a story about a bad shepherd. Zechariah is given a little street theater to carry out, where he acts as a bad shepherd, slaughtering his sheep and offending the other shepherds. He breaks his two staffs, Union and Favor, signifying the end of the favor of God and the union of the people of Israel. Then he continues to shepherd the sheep, with broken staffs and no other shepherds to help him.
The message is pretty clear: keep going down this path and this is what you will get. Leadership has always been a problem in our Story. The hunt for an effective leader for Israel has at this point been going on for close to a thousand years, and nobody really seems to make the cut. Riffing on the prophecies of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah, Zechariah speaks about God himself coming to shepherd his people. He talks about a king riding into Jerusalem and the city becoming both a fiery cauldron that consumes the wicked and the source of living water that flows around the earth. This shepherd will be struck down, but in his fall he will bring about a new world in which all people will come and participate in the festivals of Israel in Jerusalem.
Zechariah is painting a picture of what God intends to do in order to fulfill the big promises to Abraham, Moses, and David. He sees that the story of the people of Israel has been headed towards this one guy, the shepherd-king, who will bring about the restored world that was promised to Adam and Eve way back in Genesis 3. It is the end of the Story. After this shepherd-king comes, the river of life flows out of Jerusalem and the world looks an awful lot like the Garden of Eden. The only odd bits are this business about betrayal and the shepherd being struck down in order for this to happen.
The audience to which Zechariah is speaking and writing isn’t looking for worldwide solutions to their problems. As we saw in Haggai and will see in Malachi, and as both Ezra and Nehemiah dealt with, the returned exiles are really pretty much concerned with getting theirs back. They want to see God restore the kingdom of Solomon, when they were the envy of the earth and had all the power and wealth. Zechariah is telling a different story- one of sacrifice, suffering, and eventual restoration for all humanity. The prophet Malachi, who is the last prophet of the Hebrew Scriptures and who followed Zechariah by a few decades, will continue this theme in tomorrow’s reading. The people of Israel have returned from exile, but they haven’t really changed all that much. These last prophets see what the major prophets saw, but a little further down the timeline. There will always be a remnant in Israel who is faithful to God’s purposes for them, but the nation will not be brought to the kind of prominence that they are dreaming about. God’s victory in the human war of independence will come in a very different way.