NOTES for Zec 14:1-21

The final prophecies of Second Zechariah, collected in chapter 14, like his earlier words, essentially contain only a description of what the prophet sees in the future. Most earlier prophets, including the first Zechariah, whose prophecies make up the book's first eight chapters, address the people listening to them directly. Gaining insight into the mysteries of God's design, the prophets speak in the Lord's name, calling people to repentance and bringing a word of comfort and hope. None of this is found in Second Zechariah's prophecies: they seem to be addressed to future generations. Second Zechariah seems to call for nothing; he reports future events as inevitable, as something that has already come to pass by the will of the Almighty. In this he differs strikingly from all other prophets.

Yet a connection does exist between the prophet's words and the historical context of his life. Perhaps unknown editors and scribes did not consider it necessary to include indications of this connection in the book's text, but it can nevertheless be discerned. The point is that indifference, lack of interest in faith, had become the chief feature of spiritual life in the prophet's time. Indications of this can be found in all the last prophets, as well as in sources outside the Bible. Therefore the prophet does not count on an overt response from his listeners; he prophesies because the Spirit speaking in his heart calls him to do so. ‘Whether they listen or not’—such was the Lord's command to the prophet Ezekiel. The same may be said of Second Zechariah's prophecy: he addresses those who still wish and are able to hear him.

Moreover, his understanding of salvation is of exceptional importance for understanding Second Zechariah's prophecies. Most prophets of the first and second generations saw and emphasised in the history of their own time what anticipated the future. God's intervention in the history of the chosen people was for them the beginning, the first and incomplete manifestation of the coming Day of Visitation. In contemporary events the prophets saw only reflections of God's design and strove to understand it. For Second Zechariah, the coming advent of Christ has no parallel; the centuries preceding the Incarnation find their fullness and meaning only in the events of the Messiah's Kingdom. For him, the Messiah's coming, rejection and enthronement become the sole centre towards which history is directed and without which it has no purpose. He does not prophesy in order to change the course of history, as the prophets before him were called to do. His aim is to point to the coming events so that people may have time to prepare for them and orient their lives towards them.

This is why Second Zechariah truly is the last prophet, after whom it remains only for John the Baptist to announce that the foretold Kingdom has come. And from Second Zechariah's time begins that intense expectation which underlies the spiritual life of many of the Lord Jesus' contemporaries, from Simeon the God-receiver and Zechariah, John the Baptist's father, to Nicodemus and the apostles.

Contrary to common notions of Israel's earthly greatness under the Messiah's rule, the first prophecy in chapter 14 says that at this time the country will be devastated by foreign invaders. The prophet is not given to know that these will be the Romans, inhabitants of a distant city in the west that was then barely three centuries old, so he uses the images of captivity and the earthquake in Uzziah's time, familiar to everyone in Israel. What matters to him is to tell his listeners and readers that in the coming age of calamity and subjugation the Lord Himself will come to His people. Four centuries before the day when Simon Peter will say to Jesus, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God’, Second Zechariah says of the Messiah's coming, ‘His feet shall stand on that day on the Mount of Olives.’ But, like Joel, he sees in the Day of Visitation something incomprehensible and frightening that will shake the foundations of the world. ‘There shall be no light; the heavenly lights shall withdraw’: these words can only partly be understood as a continuation of Abraham's, Moses' and Amos' witness to the darkness surrounding the presence of the Invisible One. Second Zechariah himself does not explain them; he merely describes sparingly what was revealed to his inward gaze: ‘It shall be a day… neither day nor night; only at evening shall light appear.’ This is the very mysterious eclipse to which Luke the Evangelist bears witness: ‘It was about the sixth hour, and darkness came over all the earth until the ninth hour’ (Lk 23:44). But Second Zechariah also sees that this darkness, in which the sun will fade, will become a source of living water for the world—the very stream flowing with life from beneath the threshold of God's House of which Ezekiel spoke.

Second Zechariah concludes his message by pointing out that on that day God Himself will become King over all the earth, and His name will be the only one in the universe. People's distorted and false ideas about the Creator of the world will disappear, and they will know the true God. Therefore, throughout the world, beginning with Jerusalem, God's righteousness will triumph and every evil will be struck down.

Second Zechariah's last prophecy, which concludes the entire book, speaks of the triumph of the worship of God throughout the world. All nations, he says, will worship the King, the Lord of hosts, because without this they will have no source of life, symbolised here by the rain that makes the earth fertile. Everyone, even people as hostile to faith as the Egyptians, will take part in this worship, while Jerusalem itself and everything that has happened there will be profoundly sacred. And this triumph, this feast of faith, will be brought about by the Messiah's coming alone and by nothing else. The central thought of these final lines of the book is expressed concisely by the apostle Paul: ‘Therefore God also exalted Him and gave Him the name above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father’ (Phil 2:9–11).