One: The Prologue - Zech 1: 1-6

Michaelangelo's depiction of the prophet Zechariah on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

In the eighth month of the second year of Darius, the word of the Lord came to the prophet Zechariah son of Berekiah, the son of Iddo:

2 ‘The Lord was very angry with your ancestors. 3 Therefore tell the people: this is what the Lord Almighty says: “Return to me,” declares the Lord Almighty, “and I will return to you,” says the Lord Almighty. 4 Do not be like your ancestors, to whom the earlier prophets proclaimed: this is what the Lord Almighty says: “Turn from your evil ways and your evil practices.” But they would not listen or pay attention to me, declares the Lord. 5 Where are your ancestors now? And the prophets, do they live for ever? 6 But did not my words and my decrees, which I commanded my servants the prophets, overtake your ancestors?

‘Then they repented and said, “The Lord Almighty has done to us what our ways and practices deserve, just as he determined to do.”’

Churches are very good at looking backwards.  We celebrate the anniversaries of our foundations and commemorate the deaths of those we’ve loved.  We cherish memorials and plaques and books of remembrance.  Our church calendars encourage us to remember with thanksgiving the heroes of the faith and take encouragement from them.  We even have a special day – All Saints – to mark the also-rans, the every-day Christians who didn’t do anything to merit a special festival.  Then there are the wars and the battles where brave men and women shed their blood in the name of a cause greater than themselves.

If all of this inspires us to look ahead with confidence and faith, to live better lives, then it can only be a good thing.  But the danger of spending too much time in looking back is that we become wedded to the past, unable to move on, making the same mistakes as our forebears.  Perhaps that was the case for the inhabitants of Jerusalem at the time Zechariah was prophesying – they were suffering a kind of paralysis.

The passage above gives a precise date, the second year of the Persian Emperor Darius (520 BCE), who ruled over Jerusalem and the rest of his vast territories from afar.  The people of Judah had been carried off into exile in 586 BCE, but their Babylonian captors had themselves fallen to the Persian Empire.  Darius’s predecessor Cyrus had allowed the Jewish people to begin to return to their homeland in 538 BCE, but it was nothing like the glorious restoration promised by some of the earlier prophets.  By the time Darius took the throne the Jews were thoroughly demoralised, and the Temple was in ruins still.  They had laid the foundations, but the rebuilding had then stalled for about 16 years.

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Some scholars have been rather exercised by Zechariah’s family tree.  In Zech 1:1 and 1:7 he is named as the prophet Zechariah son of Berekiah, the son of Iddo.  In Ezra 5:1 and 6:14, however, he is Zechariah the son of Iddo.  Perhaps a scribe has made an error, they suggest, maybe muddling our Zechariah with a much earlier Zechariah son of Jeberekiah, who is mentioned in Is 8:2.

A simpler explanation, as other scholars point out, is that it’s not uncommon to skip a generation, especially if the grandfather was a person of note or the father died young.  For example, the demon driver Jehu is called son of Jehoshaphat son of Nimshi in 2 Kg 9:2, 14, but simply Jehu son of Nimshi in 1Kg 19:16 and 2Kg 9:20.  It seems that the word ‘son’ in Hebrew is more elastic than it is in English; indeed the NIV translates the Ezra passages above as ‘Zechariah descendant of Iddo.’

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Two prophets step into this situation: Zechariah and Haggai.  Both are mentioned in Ezra 5:1 and 6:14, and their prophecies are recorded in adjacent books in the Bible.  Haggai’s words are fairly easy to understand (although there are some odd sections).  In effect he tells the people to pull their collective finger out and rebuild the Temple, rather than concentrating on furnishing their own houses.  It’s no wonder you’re hard-pressed economically, he says, when you neglect the Giver of all good gifts.  Complete the job and from now on God will bless you.

Zechariah’s words are much more weird and difficult to understand, full of visions and outlandish language.  He seems to be much less concerned with the rebuilding project.  I wonder what people made of the pair of them.  Or indeed what they made of each other.

So how does God address his demoralised and unmotivated people?  Through Haggai he tells them to “Give careful thought to your ways” (Hag 1:7).  Through Zechariah he uses a different approach.  “[I] was very angry with your ancestors,” he says (Zech 1:2).  That’s why I sent them into exile.  So don’t be like them.  Don’t copy their example – it wasn’t a good one.  Instead, “This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Return to me,’ declares the Lord Almighty, ‘and I will return to you,’ says the Lord Almighty” (1:3).

God’s full title, ‘the Lord Almighty’ or ‘the Lord of hosts,’ occurs five times in this passage, perhaps to ensure that the message carries weight.  And what is the nub of the message?  “Return to me and I will return to you.”  It is a timeless offer, full of hope and promise, but dependent on people’s response. And it’s not what their ancestors did.  Time and time again, says God, the prophets warned them.  People like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Hosea and Micah.  “Repent,” they said, “or the Lord will destroy your city and your land, and you will be dragged off into exile”.

But did they listen?  Not a bit of it.

There were short-lived periods of national reform, but then the sin and rebellion reappeared, getting worse and worse.

“Where are they now?” asks God (v5).  All gone; even the prophets are no more.  My words and decrees outlasted them all, and overtook my wayward people in the end (v6), like a tireless hunting dog bringing down a wily stag.

There’s a little note of hope in v6, right at the end of the passage.

“Then they repented and said, ‘The Lord Almighty has done to us what our ways and practices deserve, just as he determined to do.’”

Who are the ‘they’ in this verse?

Maybe they are the ancestors who, once in exile, saw the error of their ways and decided to repent – although this does seem to contradict v4.  Maybe they are the people that Zechariah was speaking to – although it’s a bit odd that ‘they’ suddenly refers to them and not their ancestors.  Or maybe these were just words of confession that people used to say in regular worship – and who knows whether they meant it? At any rate, it shows that repentance was a possibility for the people Zechariah was speaking to.  The question was: would they take the opportunity?  Or were they too ground down by what they saw as the hopeless situation around them?

A few years ago I spent a day in London with Lizzie, our elder daughter.  We spent most of the afternoon in the Tate Modern.  I’d long wanted to see it, not because I’m a big fan of modern art, but because it is housed in what was Bankside Power Station.  I used to work in the power industry, and wanted to see how they’d used the immense turbine hall to house contemporary art.

Well, I had a lovely time with Lizzie, but I must admit the installations went over our heads (sometimes literally – some were massive!).  We spent most of the time wondering, “Why is this art?”  There were the 500 Venetian blinds suspended from the ceiling in a kind of inverted pyramid.  Our favourite piece was a stag made out of an ironing board and a three-wheeled iron trolley that was supposed to be a goat.  Even with the very informative cards on the walls, we were at a loss to know what was going on.  It was as though they were speaking a language where we didn’t know the grammar and hadn’t the vocabulary.  (Which admittedly is how reading Zechariah can make one feel too!)

But, thinking about it on our way out, I did detect a theme which was common to many of the works.  A lot of the pieces focused on injustice – man’s inhumanity to man.  They were about the exploitation of Third World labour, or the subjugation of women, or the harsh treatment of immigrants.  The artworks expressed an anguish about it all.

But there was also a weariness there.  These situations are awful, and we’re expressing them in art or sculpture or video – but we don’t really expect anything to change.

I think that’s how those inhabitants of war-torn Jerusalem felt.

As I said earlier, the Temple foundations had been rebuilt, but the project had run out of steam.  The glorious return promised by Isaiah and others had turned out to be a bit of a damp squib.  There were still enemies all around, and they were still under the thumb of a faraway Emperor.  There was injustice and inertia.  Hopelessness.

And, through Zechariah, God rouses them from their stupor.

“I was very angry with your ancestors.”  But that was then and this is now.  “Return to me and I will return to you.”  Can we not hear the anguish in His voice?

Please, “Return to me and I will return to you.”  We can make a new start; we can begin again.  Like a married couple trying to make a go of it after an affair.

God said that his Word overtook the errant ancestors like a hunting dog.  It outlasted and overpowered all those who chose to ignore and belittle it. 

Five hundred years later, that same Word took human flesh and dwelt among us.  That same Word lived out God’s message of judgement and forgiveness.  “Unless you repent, you will all perish,” he said (Lk 13:5).  And in the story of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15:11-32), with the father running as eagerly as any hunting dog, he showed exactly how repentance was to be met with lavish forgiveness – before he went to the cross to take the penalty for what we deserved upon himself. “Return to me and I will return to you,” God cries out to us still.

The author Francis Thompson described God’s relentless hunting of us in his poem 'The Hound of Heaven'.[1]

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

  I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

  Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

                  Up vistaed hopes I sped;

                  And shot, precipitated,

Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

                  But with unhurrying chase,

                  And unperturbèd pace,

                Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

                  They beat--and a Voice beat

                  More instant than the Feet--

                "All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."

The ancestors from whom we should draw inspiration, it turns out, are not those who have done great exploits for their country or for God.  They are simply those who have repented – turned about – and allowed themselves to be overtaken by God’s relentless love.

[1] The text of the complete poem can be found at www.houndofheaven.com/poem which I accessed on 22 August 2024