Canter Bridge

The book of Zechariah ends with a Jerusalemite flourish. YHWH sees off the agglomeration of nations that besiege the city, unending feasting is established as the soup du jour inside the walls, and the peoples of the world schedule their vacations—admittedly under some compulsion—so that they can join the noise.

In the process a long-standing priestly imperative is undermined. An important feature of the biblical plot line underscores the lethal danger that living in close quarters with a holy God entails for Israel. The priestly legislation is aimed in part at establishing and then carefully maintaining the equilibrium that is required if the people are to survive YHWH’s company. Careful distinctions, not least between what is holy and what is mundane, contribute to this blessed status quo and are maintained against the rage that might ensue if YHWH’s proximity were to be met with casual indifference.

Zechariah’s apocalyptic horizon leads him to claim that this is all a provisional arrangement. It will in due course be replaced by a blanket sanctification of Jerusalem and her inhabitants that will allow the priestly burden and its supporting institutions to fall away. Zechariah’s vision is not so much anti-priest as pro-holiness:

On that day there shall be inscribed on the bells of the horses, ‘Holy to the LORD.’ And the cooking pots in the house of the LORD shall be as holy as the bowls in front of the altar; and every cooking pot in Jerusalem and Judah shall be sacred to the LORD of hosts, so that all who sacrifice may come and use them to boil the flesh of the sacrifice. And there shall no longer be traders in the house of the LORD of hosts on that day.

The prophet glimpses a partiality, an incompleteness in those arrangements—however obligatory they may be—that would shut out some persons and exclude some things from the blessedness of purity.

At the end of a rather long prophetic scroll, we are asked to believe that when it comes to pure celebration, pure proximity to the Lord, and a life cut from a single cloth rather than multiple patches, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.