NOTES for Zec 2:10
What makes the people of God the people of God? Special qualities? Hardly: in this respect the Jewish people are like all others. Of course, they have their own national face, always and everywhere easily recognizable; but what people does not? Then perhaps a special destiny? In a certain sense, yes: not every people can boast of such sharp turns in its history.
But all this is still a human matter. Who knows what twists history can produce when four millennia are involved. The presence of God among His people, however, is God's matter; it does not depend on people or on history. Though, of course, this independence is relative: preserving and guarding the presence of God is precisely a human task, entrusted to the people of God, who were called to bear witness to God dwelling among them. But then it is also true that the people of God remain such only as long as there is a place for God among them.
It is no accident that both the Torah and the prophets speak not so much of the people's ownership of the land God gave them as of their use of it, a use limited by the conditions of the covenant-union made with God. If the union is broken, a situation may quite well arise in which the people lose both their land and the Temple. But such a thing can become possible only in one case: if God leaves, if He abandons the land, the city, and the Temple that He once blessed and sanctified by His presence.
After that, the destruction of the city and the Temple and the desolation of the land become only the outward expression of this new spiritual condition, a kind of anti-witness, proof that, at least at this historical stage, the people did not manage to fulfill its spiritual task. But the return of the people to the land of their fathers, the restoration of the city and the Temple, mean precisely that, after repentance and a new turning, the people are again ready for the mission God has entrusted to them. And that means that a new stage begins in their historical destiny: a stage that leads them straight to the threshold of the New Covenant.