One Lord, and His Name One

The temple was finished. The doors were on it, the lamps were lit, the priests were back in their divisions, and there was singing on the hill again. And Zechariah went on. He was an older man by now, and what came to him in those years is not like what came first. There is no measuring line in it and no plumb line, and nobody wakes him to ask what he sees. It has stopped being about what is being built. It is about what is still coming — and it comes in pieces, some of it lovely and some of it very hard to look at.

It starts with rain. “Ask the Lord for rain in its season, the early rain and the late rain. It is the Lord who makes the bright signs in the sky, and he will give the winter rain, and grass in the field for everyone.” People had been asking somebody else for their rain. The fortune-tellers had been talking trouble; the men who read signs had seen visions that were not there; the dream-readers had told dreams that never came; and all of it was comfort with nothing in it. So the people had been driven about like sheep, because there was no healing anywhere in it.

Then God said whose fault that was. “My anger burned against the shepherds, and I will see to the lambs myself.” Shepherds means the men who were supposed to be looking after everybody. God says he is coming to look over his own flock, the house of Judah, and make them like his own splendid warhorse. “I will make the house of Judah strong and rescue the house of Joseph. I will settle them again, because I have loved them, and it will be as though I had never thrown them away.” “I will whistle for them and gather them in, because I have paid to get them back. I will bring them home out of Egypt and gather them out of Assyria, and not one of them will be left behind.”

And then, with no warning, Zechariah’s words turn. “Open your doors, Lebanon, and let the fire eat your cedars. Howl, pine tree, because the cedar has fallen and the great ones are broken. Howl, oaks of Bashan, because the thick forest is pulled down.” “Listen to the shepherds crying, because their greatness has been brought low. Listen to the lions roaring, because the pride of the Jordan is gone.”

Then God gave Zechariah a job, and it was not a comfortable one. He was to go and be a shepherd himself — and the flock he was handed was a flock being kept to be killed. “Feed the sheep that are marked for the knife. The men who own them kill them and are not sorry. The men who sell them say —” “Blessed be the Lord. We are rich.” “— and their own shepherds feel nothing for them at all.” So he did it. A shepherd carries a staff; Zechariah took two, and gave them names. One he called Beauty. The other he called Line, because a line is what ties two things together. And he fed the flock. He got rid of three shepherds in one month, and it wore him down — his soul was grieved over them, and their souls could not bear him. In the end he had had enough of the whole business, and he said: “I am not feeding you any more. Let the one that is dying die, and the one that is lost stay lost, and the ones that are left can eat each other.” Then he took the staff called Beauty and threw it away, and that broke the promise he had made with all the peoples. It broke that day, and the men who dealt in those sheep knew it was the word of the Lord. Then he turned round and asked to be paid. “If it seems good to you, give me my wages. If it does not, keep them.” And they weighed it out for him. Thirty pieces of silver. And the Lord said to him: “Drop them into the furnace, and let us see whether it is good metal — the way I was tested for their sake.” So he took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them into the furnace in the house of the Lord. Then he threw the second staff away too, the one called Line, and that broke the bond between Judah and Israel. That was what he was told to do, and what he did, and what they paid him.

Then God told him to pick up the gear of a shepherd who does not know his work. “Look — I am going to raise up a shepherd over this land who will not go after the one that is dying, or hunt the one that is lost, or heal the one that is hurt, or lead the one that is well. He will eat the best of the meat, and break their necks.” “How terrible for the worthless shepherd who walked off and left the sheep. The sword will find his arm and his right eye. His arm will wither right up, and his right eye will go dark.”

After that come the promises, and every one belongs to a day that has not happened yet. They begin by saying who is talking: the Lord, who stretches out the sky, lays the ground under the earth, and shapes the spirit of a person inside him. “Look — I am going to make Jerusalem like a doorpost that shakes for every nation round about. On that day I will make Jerusalem a stone that all the nations trample on and laugh at, and all the nations of the earth will come together against it.” “On that day I will strike every horse with bewilderment and every rider with madness. But I will keep my eyes open over the house of Judah, and strike every horse of the nations blind.” And the commanders of Judah will say to themselves, “We will find the people of Jerusalem for ourselves, in the Lord Almighty their God.” “On that day I will make them like a firebrand in a woodpile and a burning torch in dry stubble. And the weakest man among them that day will be like David; and the house of David will be like the house of God.”

And then this. “And I will pour out on the house of David and on the people of Jerusalem a spirit of favor and of pity. And they will look at me, because they mocked me. And they will mourn for him the way you mourn for somebody you loved, and grieve for him as a man grieves for his first son.” They will look at me, he says, and they will mourn for him. “On that day the mourning in Jerusalem will be very great. And the land will mourn family by family. David’s family by itself, and their wives by themselves. Nathan’s family by itself. Levi’s family by itself. Simeon’s family by itself. And all the families that are left, every one of them by itself, and their wives by themselves.” Every household on its own, behind its own door.

And then a cleaning out. “On that day every place in the house of David will be opened. I will wipe the names of the idols out of the land, and nobody will remember them any more; and I will take the false prophets and the unclean spirit out of the land.” And the men who told lies for a living will be finished. If one of them still tries it, his own father and mother will say to him: “You are not going to live, because you have told lies in the Lord’s name.” And they will tie him up while he is still saying it. Every one of them will be ashamed of the visions he told, and they will put on rough hair coats because they lied. And one will say: “I am not a prophet. I am a farmer. A man put me to this work when I was young.” And God says he will ask him what the wounds between his hands are. And the man will answer: “I got them in the house of the one I loved.”

Then the sword again. “Wake up, sword, against my shepherds, and against the man who lives beside me, says the Lord Almighty. Strike the shepherds, and the sheep will be drawn away; and I will bring my hand down on the shepherds.” “In all the land, two parts of it will be destroyed and gone, and the third part will be left. And I will bring that third part through the fire, and test them the way silver is tested. And they will call on my name, and I will answer them. I will say: this is my people.” And they will say: “The Lord is my God.”

And then the last day. “I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem for war. The city will be taken and the houses robbed, and half the city will go out into exile — but the rest of my people will not be wiped out of it.” “And then the Lord will go out and fight those nations, the way he fights on a day of battle. On that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem, and the Mount of Olives will split in two, half of it east and half of it west, with a very great valley opening between them. And then the Lord my God will come, and all the holy ones with him.” “On that day there will be no light, no cold, no frost. There will be one day, and only the Lord knows which. It will not be day and it will not be night — and toward evening there will be light.” “And on that day living water will go out of Jerusalem, half of it to the sea in the east and half to the sea in the west, and it will run in the summer and in the spring.”

Then what happens to the nations that came against Jerusalem. Their flesh will waste away while they are still standing on their feet, and their eyes in their sockets, and their tongues in their mouths. A great panic from the Lord will fall on them, and every man will grab his neighbor’s hand and not be able to let go. The same thing will strike the horses and the mules and the camels and the donkeys and every animal in those camps. Judah will fight too, and gather up the wealth of the nations round about — gold and silver and clothing, heaps of it. And then everybody left of those nations — the ones who came to fight — will go up to Jerusalem, year after year, to bow down to the King, the Lord Almighty, and to keep the Feast of Tents, the week when people live outside in shelters of branches. Any tribe that will not come up gets the same trouble as the rest, and Egypt is named by name. And on that day the writing on the bridle of every horse will say: “Holy to the Lord Almighty.” And the cooking pots in the house of the Lord will be as holy as the bowls at the altar, and every pot in Jerusalem and Judah will be holy too, so anybody who comes to sacrifice can take one down and boil his meat in it. And there will be no Canaanite left in the house of the Lord Almighty.

And in among all of it, this, said plainly: “The Lord will be King over the whole earth. On that day there will be one Lord, and his name one.”