Fasting and Restoration

Two years after the visions, a concrete question reaches Zechariah, and it opens the last of the chapters given to the present of the people. Envoys come to ask whether the fasts of mourning instituted during the exile should continue, now that the Temple is rising again. God’s answer shifts the question: before settling the fate of the fasts, he means to set right the heart that fasts, then he lets the restored Jerusalem appear toward which this whole book tends, a city of peace where the nations themselves will come to seek God.

The question about fasting

The occasion is precise and dated: “In the fourth year of King Darius, the word of the Lord came to Zechariah.” Zechariah 7:1. People from Bethel send a delegation to the priests and prophets of Jerusalem with a simple question: “Am I to weep in the fifth month, and to abstain, as I have done for so many years?” Zechariah 7:3. The fast of the fifth month commemorated the destruction of the Temple by the Babylonians; for seventy years the grieving people had wept that disaster on a fixed date. But the Temple is being rebuilt, and the question becomes legitimate: has this mourning any reason left? Should one keep weeping for a loss that is being repaired? The request is sincere, and God will answer it, but by going back first to what makes a fast worthy or empty.

True fasting and justice

Rather than say yes or no, God turns the question back on those who ask it: “When you fasted and kept mourning in the fifth and seventh month, for seventy years, was it for me that you fasted? And when you eat and drink, is it not you who eat and you who drink?” Zechariah 7:5-6. The question reaches the heart of the matter: this fast, did the people keep it for God, or for themselves, as a habit turned toward their own grief? A fast that does not turn toward God is worth no more than ordinary meals: the people were weeping over their own trial without referring that mourning to God. God then recalls what he had always asked through the prophets before the exile, and what comes before any rite: “Render judgment according to truth; practise mercy and compassion, each toward his brother; do not oppress the widow and the orphan, the stranger and the poor.” Zechariah 7:9-10. This is the worship God wants first: judgment rendered, kindness toward one’s brother, protection of the weakest. And God recalls why the exile had come: the fathers had refused precisely this. “They refused to listen, they turned a rebellious shoulder; they made their heart hard as diamond, so as not to hear the law.” Zechariah 7:11-12. A heart hard as the hardest stone lets nothing in; it was this refusal to listen, not a lack of fasts, that had led the people into exile. The lesson for the living is clear: the true question is not whether to fast in this month or that, but whether the heart listens to God and renders justice to its neighbour.

Jerusalem restored

Having set the heart right, God then makes the city to come shine out. He proclaims his return and his will to dwell among his own: “I have returned to Zion, and I will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem; Jerusalem will be called the city of truth, and the mountain of the Lord of hosts, the mountain of holiness.” Zechariah 8:3. The city changes its name because it changes its heart: it will be the city of truth, the place where God dwells. And God paints its tenderest picture, made of peaceful old age and joyful childhood: “There will again be old men and aged women sitting in the squares of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand, because of the great number of their days. And the squares of the city will be filled with boys and girls playing in its squares.” Zechariah 8:4-5. To live to old age and to see children playing in the streets is the sign of a lasting peace and a blessed land, after the carnage of war and the uprooting of exile. And the scattered people will return from everywhere: “Behold, I am about to deliver my people from the land of the east and from the land of the setting sun. I will bring them, and they will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem; they will be my people, and I will be their God, in truth and justice.” Zechariah 8:7-8. The words “they will be my people, and I will be their God” are the very ones by which God had sealed his covenant at Sinai: “I will be your God, and you will be my people.” Leviticus 26:12. By taking them up again for the people returned from exile, God restores the bond that the deportation seemed to have broken: he takes back his own as on the first day.

The fasts turned into joy

At last comes the answer to the question of the envoys from Bethel, but transfigured. God does not merely say that the fasts may cease: he announces that they will become feasts. “The fast of the fourth month, the fast of the fifth, the fast of the seventh and the fast of the tenth month will be changed for the house of Judah into rejoicing and gladness, and into joyful festivals.” Zechariah 8:19. The four fasts that marked the stages of Jerusalem’s fall, the siege, the capture, the destruction of the Temple and the murder of the governor, will become so many feasts, for what they mourned is repaired. The mourning does not merely stop, it is turned into joy. And God joins to this promise a condition that takes up the lesson of the previous chapter: “Love truth and peace.” Zechariah 8:19. The joy promised is no automatic due; it is bound to the truth and the peace that the people must live, the exact echo of the justice asked above.

The nations go up to Jerusalem

The book then widens the horizon beyond Israel. The restored city will draw the peoples of the whole world, come to seek God: “Peoples will yet come, and the inhabitants of a great number of cities. The inhabitants of one will go to another, saying: Let us go, let us go to implore the Lord and to seek the Lord of hosts.” Zechariah 8:20-21. What was the faith of one people becomes the object of a universal search: the nations invite one another to go up toward the God of Jerusalem. And the last image of the chapter shows this attraction: “In those days, ten men of all the languages of the nations will seize the hem of the robe of a Jew, saying: We too want to go with you, for we have learned that God is with you.” Zechariah 8:23. The nations attach themselves to the people who bear the presence of God, as one grasps the garment of the one who knows the way. The first part of the book, the part of ruins and mourning, thus ends on a city of peace where God dwells and toward which the whole world sets out. This going up of the nations toward Jerusalem already opens onto the second part of the book, which will announce the king through whom this gathering will be accomplished.