Scripture Daily

Context No. 543 of 4322 · Zechariah

Context · Reflection

Zechariah 14:12-21: in context

12This will be the plague with which the LORD will strike all the peoples who have fought against Jerusalem: their flesh will consume away while they stand on their feet, and their eyes will consume away in their sockets, and their tongue will consume away in their mouth. 13It will happen in that day that a great panic from the LORD will be among them; and they will each seize the hand of his neighbor, and his hand will rise up against the hand of his neighbor. 14Judah also will fight at Jerusalem; and the wealth of all the surrounding nations will be gathered together: gold, silver, and clothing, in great abundance. 15A plague like this will fall on the horse, on the mule, on the camel, on the donkey, and on all the animals that will be in those camps. 16It will happen that everyone who is left of all the nations that came against Jerusalem will go up from year to year to worship the King, the LORD of Armies, and to keep the feast of booths. 17It will be that whoever of all the families of the earth doesn’t go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the LORD of Armies, on them there will be no rain. 18If the family of Egypt doesn’t go up and doesn’t come, neither will it rain on them. This will be the plague with which the LORD will strike the nations that don’t go up to keep the feast of booths. 19This will be the punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all the nations that don’t go up to keep the feast of booths. 20In that day there will be inscribed on the bells of the horses, “HOLY TO THE LORD”; and the pots in the LORD’s house will be like the bowls before the altar. 21Yes, every pot in Jerusalem and in Judah will be holy to the LORD of Armies; and all those who sacrifice will come and take of them, and cook in them. In that day there will no longer be a Canaanite in the house of the LORD of Armies.

The end of Zechariah is strange and hard, full of plague and panic falling on the nations that warred against Jerusalem, imagery I will not pretend is comfortable. But out of all that upheaval the prophecy arrives somewhere astonishing, and the last two verses are among the most quietly radical in the Old Testament. In that day, Zechariah says, there will be inscribed on the bells of the horses, HOLY TO THE LORD, and every pot in Jerusalem and Judah will be holy to the LORD of Armies. Those words, Holy to the LORD, were the inscription engraved on the gold plate of the high priest's crown, the single most sacred object of dedication in Israel's worship. And now they are stamped on horses' bells and cooking pots.

Think about what that means. The most sacred phrase in the religion, reserved for the holiest object, ends up written on the jingling bells of workhorses and on the ordinary pots people boil their dinner in. The line between the sacred and the ordinary, so carefully guarded all through the law, collapses. In that day there is no special category of holy things set apart from common ones, because everything has become holy, dedicated to God, right down to the kitchenware and the tack on the animals. The whole of ordinary life, its tools, its work, its most mundane objects, is taken up and made holy to the LORD.

That is a vision to live toward now. I tend to quarantine the holy into a small religious corner, my prayers, my Sundays, the explicitly spiritual, while the vast ordinary bulk of my life, my work, my chores, the pots and the commute, stays merely secular, unconnected to God. Zechariah sees a day when the horse-bells and the cooking pots bear the high priest's inscription, when nothing ordinary is left outside the holy. Do I treat the mundane objects and tasks of my day as holy to the LORD, or have I fenced God off into a religious corner while the rest of my life carries no inscription at all?

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