Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi

The goodly fellowship of the prophets praise thee. (BCP p. 53)

Today is the final day of the two-year Daily Office Lectionary cycle. Fittingly, we have been reading the final books of the Old Testament: Malachi last week and Zechariah this week. Were it my choice, I would have reversed the two in order to end with the final verses of Malachi:

Remember ye the law of Moses my servant, which I commanded unto him in Horeb for all Israel, with the statutes and judgments. Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse. (Malachi 4:4-6)

Was Malachi moved to write such words, perhaps sensing that this was the end -- there would be no more prophetic writings? They make a stirring conclusion to the Old Testament, and look forward to “Elias, which was for to come” (Matthew 11:14), as well as the “Sun of righteousness, aris[ing] with healing in his wings” (Malachi 4:2), both of them hundreds of years in the future.

How is one to take the prophetic writings? Our Lord took them seriously, repeatedly applying them to himself. The long tradition of Christian thought from St. Paul and the other apostles right through into the nineteenth century did the same. Modern scholarship is more likely to discount the possibility of any mystical meanings. Everything refers to the contemporary circumstances in which the prophets wrote, whether addressed directly or veiled in symbolic language. Such value as the old prophecies might have is limited to the prophets’ perception of the spiritual issues at stake in their time and place, and potential resonance with later times and places. All supposed references to a future Messiah are, of course, wishful thinking. Or they are propaganda to give hope to an oppressed people, much like (in this view) the Revelation of St. John the Divine. It is all comfortably removed from any serious application to our lives in the twenty-first century, cut asunder from the Gospels, the life of Christ, and the ongoing life of the Church.

Following this approach, our Lord must have been delusional to apply these ancient prophecies to himself -- if he ever did in the first place. Perhaps they were pasted in by the “early Christian communities” who supposedly created the Gospel accounts, choosing fragments of the sayings and actions of “Rabbi Jesus” that suited their immediate purposes and larding them over with pious fabrication.


In the Lectionary, we are given a full reading of Malachi, but only get about half of Zechariah. We spend a week -- this week now concluding -- reading from chapter nine to the end. The first eight chapters are represented by one fragment, Zechariah 1:7-17, appointed for Monday of the week closest to October 26 (Proper 25, Year One). His contemporary Haggai -- whose book is admittedly short -- gets just one day: Sunday of the week just mentioned, 1:1--2:9. [The word of the LORD came to both prophets in the second year of Darius (Haggai 1:1 and Zechariah 1:1). Malachi is probably about two generations later, contemporary with Nehemiah.]

All three of these prophets do indeed speak of their own time. Their pressing concerns are the post-exilic rebuilding of the Temple and the walls of Jerusalem, the re-establishment of Levitical and priestly ministry, the support thereof through tithes and offerings, and the spiritual condition of the community: people, priest and Levites all.

But intermingled with all this are statements that must have leaped out to John the Baptist and his cousin Jesus, as they leap out to us two millennia later:

Behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass. (Zechariah 9:9)

Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, and against the man that is my fellow, saith the LORD of hosts: smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered... (Zechariah 12:7)

... and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of his covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, he shall come, saith the LORD of hosts. (Malachi 3:1)

And there is the recurring image, here in Zechariah as well as the latter part of Ezekiel, and most of all at the end of the Revelation:

And it shall be in that day that living waters shall go out from Jerusalem; half of them toward the former sea, and half of them toward the hinder sea: in summer and in winter shall it be. (Zechariah 14:8 -- c.f. Ezekiel 47, Revelation 22:1-2)

Doubtless the liberals would say that St. John the Divine’s overactive imagination dredged up these Old Testament passages from his subconscious. I prefer to think that the Author considered it important enough to say three times, in the hand of three different witnesses.

It seems to me that a passage such as Zechariah 9:9 is paradigmatic of how prophecies are fulfilled. When the time is right, something happens in the plain light of day, and those who know the prophecy see it with sudden awareness, an awareness that most often overturns their world: “So that is what he was talking about!”


The book of the prophet Zechariah, especially its first eight chapters, is as much of a mixture of straightforward ethical teaching alongside wild and often incomprehensible visions as one can find in all of Scripture. I love the vision of the angel with the horses “among the myrtle trees that were in the bottom” (1:7-21); the measuring line (chapter 2); Joshua the high priest, who foreshadows the greater High Priest who is to come: “my servant the BRANCH” (3:8); the two olive trees, their branches emptying golden oil directly into the candlestick (chapter 4; c.f. Revelation 11:4); the “flying roll” and two women with “wings like the wings of a stork” in chapter 5, and the four chariots and mountains of brass in chapter 6.

Whew!!!!

I believe that the genuine prophets (for there have ever been many false prophets), the ones whose writings we have in the Old Testament, faithfully presented the word of the LORD as it came to them. It was not simply their imagination, or their clever political and social commentary; it was exactly what they claimed -- the “word of the LORD.” I suspect that some of it was as strange to them as it sometimes seems to us. And I suspect that they knew that there was more to it than what they could comprehend, even as they wrote it, words and visions that would not be clear until some future generation.

And I heard, but understood not: then said I, O my Lord, what shall be the end of these things? And he said, Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end. (Daniel 12:8-9)