NOTES for Mal 3:1-6
The beginning of the third chapter of the book of the prophet Malachi contains an exceptionally important prophecy, expressed in very precise words. In the translation familiar to us, it sounds less vivid, although behind it lies a very deep and powerful experience of the prophet. One of the first generation of prophets, Isaiah of Jerusalem, answers the Lord's question ‘Whom shall I send?’ with ‘Here I am; send me.’ Like Isaiah and many of his fellow prophets, Malachi felt himself to be the Almighty's messenger. ‘God has sent me to you’ — these are key words on the lips of the prophets. For Malachi they have a special resonance: this is the essence of his name and, as all the ancients were convinced, the essence of his life. ‘M'leakhi’ — the Envoy of the Most High, the Messenger — this is what prophets who proclaim God's truth are called. This is what the incorporeal spirits whom God sends to people are called. With all possible precision, the Greek translations use here the word aggelos, which literally means ‘messenger, envoy’. Modern Bible translations leave these words from ancient languages unchanged, thereby making their meaning harder for us to understand.
The prophet whose name is Messenger speaks as a herald on the Lord's behalf: ‘Behold, I send My Messenger, and he will prepare the way before Me; and suddenly the Lord whom you seek will come to His Temple, and the Messenger of the covenant whom you desire; behold, He is coming.’ Not a military or spiritual leader, not a ruler who orders the country's life: a Messenger. The Lord Himself, says Malachi the Messenger, will come as the Messenger of the covenant to convey the Message about God and His Kingdom, the Good News that Greek will call the Gospel.
Malachi's words about the Messenger who will prepare the way before God are, of course, a reminder of Second Isaiah's prophecy about ‘the voice of one crying in the wilderness’. The heart of his message is this: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God; let every valley be filled, and every mountain and hill be brought low, let the crooked places be made straight and the rough ways smooth; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed’ (Is 40:3–5). The crookedness of human ways must be straightened, all injustice and violence must disappear — and the glory of the Lord will be revealed. God's Messenger will not coerce people or, as we now say, ‘line them up’ like a guard of honour: he is the voice of the One who calls, and his ministry is to call for the correction of human ways. In the same way, God Himself will come as a Messenger, proclaiming the establishment of the New Covenant, sealed with His sacrificial blood. The Messiah and His Forerunner will come and say, ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand’, and it will remain our choice whether or not to heed this call. How strikingly this differs from what the Jews thought, and how precisely it corresponds to what Jesus of Nazareth and John, His Forerunner, did!
And the appearance of Christ, the Messenger of the covenant, will be a searing fire. The most beautiful, the deepest and most living reality in the Bible lies behind this image of fire. ‘Oh, that You would rend the heavens and come down — the mountains would melt before Your face!’ exclaims Second Isaiah, borne aloft by love for the Incomprehensible One. Silver purified in the furnace, in the flame of God's appearing — this is how Ezekiel sees the Remnant of Israel. ‘I have come to cast fire upon the earth,’ says the Saviour Himself. The flame of divine love, in which the human heart is melted down and, purified, itself begins to shine with love in return; a flame that burns to the bone, to the very depths of one's being, living and astonishingly real — such is the relationship to which the Messenger of the covenant calls us. And so Malachi quotes here another fiery word from the Old Testament: ‘The voice of my beloved! Behold, he is coming...’, exclaims the unknown author of the Song of Songs.
No sin will withstand this flame of the Message of the Creator's love, and those purified by it will offer sacrifice to the Lord in righteousness, the prophet says. Like the author of Deuteronomy and the apostle Paul, Malachi knows this fiery essence of faith and reveals to his hearers this Message that God is a consuming Fire. The flame of which he speaks, the flame of the Creator's love, will be judgment for those who are unable to love God and other people with the same ardour, for sorcerers and for those who withhold workers' pay, who oppress the defenceless and refugees, who are not afraid to cause pain. But it is a flame of life, real and unconditional, pure and boundless. In these six verses the prophet reveals to us his forevision of what the Church Fathers called deification, the reason why the great mystics called faith in Christ a fire. The apostles will see this flame of the Holy Spirit when it descends upon them on the day of Pentecost.