NOTES for Zec 12:10

Second Zechariah utters another prophecy about the Messiah's coming, and, like the previous one, it speaks of the tragic mystery of Christ's rejection. The prophet sees the coming Kingdom not as a victorious march through countries and lands, bringing nations into submission to Israel's faith and its King, but as a time of tension and struggle. Hostility between Israel and foreign peoples will reach a frenzy, and the burden of the confrontation will be unbearable for everyone; only Jerusalem will be strong through the faith of its inhabitants.

Amid this tension, salvation from the Lord and an end to hostility will come to a people far from spiritual unity. Many prophets, like Second Zechariah, use this image of victory over enemies to show that in the Messiah's Kingdom God Himself will protect people, that human life will no longer be determined by earthly dangers and conflict. But this does not mean heavenly armies going into battle instead of people, or even alongside them. God's protection consists in strengthening people themselves as they are seared by the flame of renewal. The prophet says that under the Lord's protection the weakest inhabitant of Jerusalem ‘will be like David, and the house of David will be like God, like the Angel of the Lord’. Thus it is the inward spiritual strength of the faithful that is meant, making them inaccessible to the evil reigning in the world. And so the words about the Descendant of David's house cease to be merely a poetic image and become a prophecy of His divine-human nature.

This inward ability to withstand evil will be revealed in people with the Messiah's coming because God will pour out His Spirit upon them: the Spirit of grace and tender compunction, granting the ability to see God and comprehend His saving intervention. Joel prophesied this outpouring of the Spirit in the same years as Second Zechariah. But Second Zechariah speaks of the grief and weeping that will seize Jerusalem because of what it has done. What is this? The prophet's text allows different translations: ‘they will look upon Me whom they have pierced’ and ‘they will look upon Him whom they have pierced’. But the meaning of these words is unambiguous. The prophet speaks of a pierced heart, and since he has spoken above of David's Descendant, who will be God's Presence among people, this is the pierced heart of the Son of God, Israel's Messiah. All Jerusalem, which here symbolises the people beloved of God, will gaze upon the Pierced One and weep for Him as for a firstborn and only-begotten Son.

How a prophet inspired by God chooses his words will remain a mystery to us for ever. We see only the fruit of it: whether intentionally or not, the prophet speaks precisely the words that, in a theological sense, correspond most accurately to the mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God. Perhaps the prophet meant the Messiah as David's only-begotten son, but as we read these words we cannot help recalling the liturgical hymn ‘Only-begotten Son and Word of God…’.

The lament for the Pierced Messiah is also marked by an important feature of the worship of the one God in the Old Testament: each tribe, each part of the chosen people, performs this lament ‘apart’, separately from the others. This is how the law prescribes the offering of a solemn sacrifice to God. This separateness of the lament, too, contains an indication of the mystery of His divine-human nature.

Yet over all this stands the central message the prophet wishes to convey to his listeners and readers. The Messiah's Kingdom will come when people weep at the sight of God's Pierced Anointed One. The prophet sees this as the central turning point in humanity's spiritual history. The suffering people cause God by betraying His love will become visible, embodied in Christ's wounds. For Second Zechariah, this makes utterly concrete the terror that seized many prophets at the thought of the Day of Visitation. But it is only in this grief, in this weeping, that the prophet discerns a source of cleansing, a source of life, a source of strength for people.

‘They shall look upon Him whom they have pierced’, as this prophecy is heard during Holy Week: these words are closely connected with the events of the Exodus, when Moses lifted up a serpent on a cross-shaped staff and those who looked at it became invulnerable to the serpents' venom. The prophecy becomes fully clear in the words the Lord Jesus spoke to Nicodemus: ‘As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life’ (Jn 3:14–15).

The conclusion of this prophecy consists of the words assigned by the scribes to the first verse of chapter 13. ‘On that day,’ says the prophet, ‘a fountain will be opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to wash away sin and uncleanness.’ On the one hand, the prophet sees that grief over the Pierced Messiah's wounds, tears for Him, are the only thing that can cleanse the human heart and free it from the sin hidden within it. Yet at the same time, as we read these words, we cannot help thinking of the true source of cleansing: the Blood flowing from Christ's wounds.

At the beginning of chapter 13, Second Zechariah places a brief prophecy about the coming of the Day of the Lord, in which he again speaks of people being freed from idolatry and every kind of falsehood. The prophet paints a fearsome picture whose essence is that nothing earthly will triumph over God's righteousness. Above all, this means that people will not boast of their spiritual strength or spiritual gifts, but will humbly fulfil the Spirit's commands.

Here Second Zechariah turns to the famous words of the first of his predecessors, the prophet Amos. In the middle of the eighth century BC, faced with an attempt to silence him, Amos said that he did not prophesy of his own will. ‘I am not a prophet… I was a shepherd and gathered sycamore figs,’ says Amos, ‘but the Lord took me from the sheep, and the Lord said to me: “Go, prophesy…”’ (Amos 7:14). Speaking of the Messiah's Kingdom, Second Zechariah quotes these words: ‘Each will say: I am not a prophet, I am a farmer, because someone made me a slave…’ With the Messiah's coming, fulfilling God's commands will become people's sole motive, and their spiritual strength will be determined by this alone.

But here, too, Second Zechariah cannot turn his gaze from the central thing the Lord has revealed to him. Thus Amos' obedience becomes for him a symbol of the Messiah's obedience, of which the apostle Paul will say: ‘He humbled Himself, becoming obedient even to death, and death on a cross’ (Phil 2:8). This is the meaning of the prophet's mysterious words about the scars on the hands of the one who enters God's Kingdom by the path of obedience. The words ‘I was beaten in the house of those who love me’ become here a prophecy of the way of the Cross walked by Christ and by those who follow Him.

The chapter's final three verses contain another prophecy, again concerning the fate of the Messiah and of people. The prophet sees a sword raised over Israel's Shepherd and sees the confusion and scattering of His sheep. ‘Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered’: the prophet sees the Messiah's loneliness, His abandonment at the terrible moment of His arrest. But he also sees that there is and can be no one to stand beside Him, because there is no one like Him. Therefore the Messiah's defeat will become for His bewildered sheep a crucible in which their hearts will be melted down and brought to life. In this defeat of the Messiah and in their own scattering, His sheep, the disciples, will find God Himself, as the chapter's final words say. Thus, despite being scattered, the sheep of Israel's Shepherd will become the pure gold of the Church, the gold of which the prophet Ezekiel spoke and of which the apostle Peter will later speak.

One sign of the triumph of God’s truth will be the end of false prophecy, mentioned alongside idolatry. False prophets resemble idolaters not only because they turn to spiritual powers that have fallen away from God, but also because they offer themselves as objects of attention and thus, in essence, become idols—not only for a credulous public, but even for themselves. Such false teachers bring condemnation upon themselves, which is hardly surprising: they are reproved throughout the Old Testament. Yet in Zechariah’s prophecy we see hope of repentance even for such people. They, too, can change their ways, become ashamed of their pursuits, and renounce them.

In the words “I am no prophet; I am a tiller of the soil,” one can see a renunciation not only of deliberate falsehood, but also of the self-deception that prevents us from seeing our own vocation and developing the real gifts implanted in us by the Creator.