My Messenger, and the Long Quiet

After that came a short word, and it started an argument. The people are home. The wall is up, the temple is standing, the offerings go up morning and evening, and nothing much happens. Then a prophet stands up, and his name means my messenger, and what he says is not a story and not a vision. It is God talking to his people, and the people answering him back. “I have loved you.” “How have you loved us?” “Was not Esau Jacob’s brother? And I loved Jacob. Look at what became of Esau’s country. Its people say, ‘We have been knocked down, but we will go back and build the ruins up again.’ They may build. I will pull down.” And you will see it with your own eyes, God says, and you will say: the Lord is great, further out than the borders of Israel.

“A son honors his father, and a servant honors his master. If I am a father, then where is my honor? If I am a master, where is the fear of me?” He was talking to the priests. And the priests said, “How have we not honored your name?” “By the bread you put on my altar.” “How have we made it common?” “By saying the Lord’s table is not worth much. You bring a blind animal to my altar and kill it there — is that not evil? You bring one that is lame, or one that is sick. Try taking that to your governor. Offer it to him as a present. See whether he is pleased with you and welcomes you. And cursed is the man who has a good ram of his own in the flock, and promises it, and then brings a sick one instead.” You would not carry the sick one to your governor and stand there expecting him to smile. And then a sentence that goes much wider than the little country it was said in: “From the rising of the sun to its setting my name is great among the nations. In every place they burn incense to my name, and bring a clean offering. I am a great King, and my name is renowned among the nations.”

“My covenant with Levi was life and peace, and I gave it to him so that he would stand in awe of my name. The law of truth was in his mouth and nothing crooked on his lips; he walked with me in peace, and he turned many people away from wrongdoing. A priest’s lips should keep knowledge safe, and people should come to his mouth to find out what the law says, because he is a messenger of the Lord. But you have turned off the road, and you have made many people trip over it.” Then God says something about their houses. “Did not one God make us? Have we not all one Father? Then why does a man break faith with his brother? The Lord was a witness between you and the wife of your young days. She was your partner. She was the wife you made a promise to. So guard your own spirit, and do not abandon the wife of your youth.” And the people answered that too. “Everybody who does evil seems to be doing very nicely, and God seems pleased with them. Where is the God of justice?”

“Look — I am sending my messenger, and he will get the road ready in front of me. And then the Lord you are looking for will come suddenly to his temple. The messenger of the covenant you say you want — look, he is coming.” “But who will hold up on the day he comes? Who will still be standing when he shows himself? He comes like the fire in a furnace, and like the harsh soap the washers use. He will sit down like a man melting silver, and he will make the sons of Levi clean, and then they will bring the Lord an offering that is right, and it will please him the way it did in the old years.” “I will come near to you for the judging, and I will be a quick witness against people who swear to lies, and against people who hold back a working man’s wages, and against people who push the widow about, and hit the child with no father, and turn the stranger away when he asks for what is fair — people who do not fear me.”

“I am the Lord, and I do not change. Come back to me, and I will come back to you.” “How shall we come back?” “Will a person cheat God? But you are cheating me.” “How have we cheated you?” “The tenth and the first of the harvest are still sitting in your houses. Bring them in. Test me in this and see whether I do not open the sky over you and pour out blessing until you have had enough of it.”

And some of them had stopped seeing any point in any of it, and said so out loud. “Serving God is a waste of work. What have we ever got out of keeping his rules and going about with long faces in front of him? The proud ones are the happy ones. People who do wrong get built up. They shove against God and get away with it.” Those were their own words. And then, quietly, in the middle of all the arguing, the people who did fear the Lord talked with each other about him. And the Lord paid attention, and listened, and a book of remembrance was written down in front of him, with their names in it — the people who feared the Lord and thought about his name. “They will be mine on the day I am making, my own treasure. And I will spare them, the way a man spares his own son who serves him.”

“Look — the day is coming, burning like an oven. Everybody proud and everybody doing wrong will be stubble, and the day will set them alight, and there will be no root left of them and no branch. But for you who fear my name, the Sun of Righteousness will rise, with healing in his wings. And you will go out and jump about like calves let out of the barn.” “Remember the law of my servant Moses, the rules and the judgments I gave him at Horeb for all Israel.” And then, last of all: “Look — I am going to send you Elijah the prophet, before the great and renowned day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the heart of a father toward his son, and the heart of a person toward his neighbor.” And then the prophets stop.

They stop for four hundred years. Four hundred years is longer than anybody can really picture. A grandmother, and her grandmother, and that five more times over: all of those people were born and grew old and died inside that gap — and in all that time nobody in Israel stood up and said, “The word of the Lord came to me.” Not once. Here is what filled it up instead. For a while the Persians went on ruling, the same empire that had sent Nehemiah home with his letters and his timber. Then a young Greek king named Alexander came out of the west with an army and took everything from Egypt to India in a few years, and died before he was thirty-three. His generals cut the world up between them and fought over the pieces for a hundred years, and the small country in the middle — Judah, with Jerusalem in it — changed hands over and over, sometimes twice in one person’s lifetime. So there were Greek soldiers in the streets and Greek coins in the market, Greek words creeping into ordinary talk and Greek names on some of the children. And far away in Egypt, in the city Alexander had named after himself, there were Jewish families whose grandchildren could not read Hebrew any more; so scholars sat down and put the whole thing into Greek for them — Moses, the histories, the psalms, the prophets. For the first time you could read what God said to Abraham in the language that sailors and soldiers spoke. There were terrible years in the middle of all that, and a fight over the temple itself, and a stretch of years when the Jews ruled their own country again. And after those years came Rome. Roman armies first, then Roman roads, then Roman taxes, and a Roman governor over everything, and soldiers standing at the corners of the temple courts at feast time watching the crowd. Rome let the country have a king of its own to run it for them, a builder named Herod, and he pulled down the plain little temple the people coming home had put up and built an enormous one in its place, white stone and gold, so big that it went on being built for forty-six years and was still not finished. And in all of it, no prophet. Nobody stood up with a message from God. Four hundred years of that.

What they had instead was the writings. Scribes copied them out with enormous care, letter by letter, checking every line so that nothing could slip. And in town after town, wherever there were enough Jews to fill a room, they built a meeting house. On the sabbath the people came in and sat down; the scroll was lifted out of its cupboard and unrolled; somebody stood up and read it out loud, and rolled it up, and sat down; and somebody explained what it meant. Which is exactly what Ezra did on his wooden platform in the square in Jerusalem — done in a small room in a small town, week after week, for four hundred years. Teachers argued about what the law meant, and groups grew up around them and got names. Some set out to keep every single rule of it exactly, down to counting out the herbs from the garden, and people called them Pharisees. Some were priests, and rich, and ran the temple, and were called Sadducees. Some walked out into the dry hills to live by themselves and wait. And ordinary people paid their taxes to Rome, and brought their lambs up to Jerusalem at Passover, and went home again, and taught their children the words. And they waited. The old promises were still there in the scrolls they read out every week — a child born in Bethlehem, a king out of David’s family, a servant who would carry everybody’s sorrows, a messenger coming to get the road ready, Elijah before the great day. They said those words to each other. Nobody knew when. The lamps were still lit in the temple every evening. The scrolls were still read out every sabbath. Four hundred years of evenings, and sabbaths, and nobody saying anything new. There was no ending. There was a whole people holding their breath.