Canter Bridge

Zechariah inhabits that prophetic intermezzo in which the divine purpose lurches redemptively between well-earned judgment and the most deeply inevitable restorative mercy. It is not a bad place for a poet to live, for the space is rich in drama and pregnant with unanticipated action. Certainty of doom crumbles over and again when YHWH decides he simply cannot continue to curse those whom his heart drives him to bless.

Zechariah observes and even articulates the divine cardiography that makes disappearance an impossible conclusion to the Jewish story. Though a chronicler of such pathos might be expected to draw his materials into a close inspection of the individual—or even representative—human soul, Zechariah does not do so. For him, redemption is necessarily communal and inescapably bumptious. YHWH’s work in the first instance fills streets rather than libraries. It peoples its story with nations struck dumb by his redemptive turnabout rather than philosophers who cooly decipher it.

Thus says the LORD of hosts: Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of their great age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets. Thus says the LORD of hosts: Even though it seems impossible to the remnant of this people in these days, should it also seem impossible to me, says the LORD of hosts?

A species of insanity haunts individual effort to trace YHWH’s hand in history and in hope. The project is necessary and even noble, but participation in YHWH’s future seems always to require—and then to reward—the casting of one’s self into the plight and destiny of a people. Redemption cannot finally be lived alone.

For this reason final mercy is so often portrayed as a city. YHWH’s movement is not appreciable if one can’t hear the neighbors.

Children, in Zechariah’s terms, might knock the old man’s staff out from under him if they’re not careful as they chase each other noisily about. Yet the risk is well worth it, for they might also climb into that man’s lap and so grace his dying minutes with a winsome, remembering smile.