They Will Look to Me, the One They Have Pierced
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Scripture: Zechariah 12–14 (with John 19:31–37 and Matthew 26:31)
Before this session, read Zechariah 12–14: the pouring out of a spirit of grace and supplication and the great lament over “me, the one they have pierced” (12:10), the fountain opened to cleanse from sin and impurity (13:1), the sword that strikes the Shepherd who is the LORD’s own associate so that the flock is scattered (13:7), the day of the LORD and His feet upon the Mount of Olives (14:4), and the climax when the LORD will be king over all the earth (14:9). Then read John 19:31–37, where the soldier’s spear pierces the side of the Lord Jesus and John tells us it fulfilled this word; Matthew 26:31, where He quotes the struck Shepherd on the night He was betrayed; and Revelation 1:7. Keep your Bible open, and ask: what does it mean to look upon the pierced One and mourn, and then to find a fountain opened?
They will look to me, the one they have pierced. They will lament for him as one laments for an only son.
(Zechariah 12:10)
The Heavy Stone
We come now to the last and highest reach of Zechariah, and to the most concentrated cluster of cross-prophecies in all the Twelve. These three chapters form a single great oracle, dense with apocalyptic imagery: nations gathered against Jerusalem, a day of the LORD, a King reigning over all the earth. And precisely because they are so vivid and so strange, they are the part of Zechariah most heavily quarried by those who read the prophets as a coded program of last-days events for an earthly nation. We will hold to our rule once more: where the New Testament tells us how these words are fulfilled, we follow it gladly, and the New Testament reaches into these very chapters again and again, for the pierced One, the struck Shepherd, and the reigning King; and where it does not, we read the visions as the prophets meant them, as pictures of the LORD’s defense of His people, the cleansing of His Church, and the final triumph of His King, fulfilled in Christ and consummated at His return.
A word about the shape of what we are reading. The last six chapters of Zechariah divide into two great oracles, each headed by the Hebrew word massa, an “oracle” or “burden” of the word of the LORD; the first, chapters nine through eleven, brought us the lowly King and the rejected Shepherd, and the second, chapters twelve through fourteen, brings us the pierced One and the reigning King. Both are written in the heightened, symbolic language of apocalyptic, where nations and sieges and earthquakes and cosmic upheavals are the vivid furniture of a vision, not the literal headlines of a datable war. To flatten these chapters into a military timetable for a modern conflict is to misread their very genre, and to miss the One they are straining to show. The gathered nations, the besieged city, the splitting mountain: these are the prophet’s grand imagery for the age-long assault of the world upon the people of God and the LORD’s final, decisive coming to save them. Read so, with the New Testament as our guide, the chapters open like a flower, and the face at their center is the face of Christ.
The oracle opens with the nations massing against Jerusalem, and the LORD’s promise to make the city their undoing. I am about to make Jerusalem a cup that brings dizziness to all the surrounding nations … Moreover, on that day I will make Jerusalem a heavy burden for all the nations, and all who try to carry it will be seriously injured (12:2–3). The Hebrew calls it, literally, “a stone of burden”: the city of God will be like a stone too heavy to lift, that ruptures all who try to heave it away. The LORD will defend His people: So on that day I will set out to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem (12:9). This is the LORD as the shield of His Church against all the massed hostility of the world, a comfort to a tiny, vulnerable remnant, and a comfort to the embattled Church in every age since. But the heart of the oracle is not the defense of the city; it is what the LORD does within His people once they are safe. He turns their eyes to One they have wounded.
The One They Have Pierced
I will pour out on the kingship of David and the population of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication so that they will look to me, the one they have pierced. They will lament for him as one laments for an only son, and there will be a bitter cry for him like the bitter cry for a firstborn (12:10). Here is one of the most astonishing verses in the Old Testament, and we must read it with care, for every clause is heavy with the gospel. First, the LORD pours out a spirit of grace and supplication. Whether we hear in that “spirit” the Holy Spirit Himself or the new heart He creates, it is poured out by the LORD, not worked up by the people; it is the work of the Spirit that opens blind eyes to see and hardened hearts to mourn, and no one looks on the pierced One in true repentance except the Spirit grant it. And then the looking: they will look to me, the one they have pierced.
We must not hurry past the first clause, for it tells us where true repentance comes from. I will pour out on the kingship of David … a spirit of grace and supplication. Before ever they look and mourn, the Spirit is poured out upon them; the looking and the mourning are not achievements they work up but gifts the Spirit grants. Left to ourselves, we do not look upon the Pierced One at all; we look away, we make excuses, we busy ourselves with anything else, for the sight is unbearable to a heart that will not own its guilt. It is the Spirit of grace who turns the face toward the cross and holds it there, and the Spirit of supplication who breaks the proud silence into prayer. This is why we pray for the conversion of the hard and the careless rather than merely scolding them: no preaching, however pointed, can by its own force make a man truly look upon the Pierced One and mourn; it is the Spirit, working through that very Word preached, who opens his eyes. The whole work, from the first glance to the last tear, is the work of the Spirit of grace.
Read the pronouns slowly, for they carry a mystery the New Testament will unfold. It is the LORD who is speaking, they will look to ME, the one they have pierced, so that the One pierced is none other than the LORD Himself. And yet the very next words shift: they will lament for HIM. The Pierced One is the LORD, and the Pierced One is Him, a distinct person who is mourned. Here, centuries before the doctrine could be spoken plainly, is a window opened into the life of God: the One who is pierced is the LORD, and yet He is mourned as another; the Son who is true God, sent by the Father, is slain in the flesh He took. We know now what Zechariah could only glimpse. On a Friday afternoon a Roman soldier drove a spear into the side of the Lord Jesus as He hung dead upon the cross, and the apostle John, standing there, tells us plainly that it happened so that the scripture would be fulfilled: They will look on the one whom they have pierced (John 19:37). The pierced One of Zechariah 12 is the crucified Son of God; and the Revelation promises that at the last, every eye will see him, even those who pierced him (Revelation 1:7). Whether men look on Him now in faith and are saved, or look on Him at the last and wail, look on Him they shall: the One whom they have pierced.
The fulfillment came with a precision that ought to make us tremble. As the Lord Jesus hung dead upon the cross, the soldiers came to break the legs of the crucified to hasten their deaths; but finding Him already dead, they broke none of His bones (fulfilling yet another scripture), and instead one of them drove a spear into His side. John, an eyewitness, sets down what he saw and tells us why it mattered: For these things happened so that the scripture would be fulfilled, “Not a bone of his will be broken.” And again another scripture says, “They will look on the one whom they have pierced” (John 19:36–37). The spear-thrust that John watched go in was the literal piercing Zechariah had foreseen five centuries before. And the looking that follows comes in two kinds, the Revelation tells us. There is the look of faith, by which sinners gaze on the Pierced One now and mourn and are saved; and there is the look of the last day, when every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all the tribes on the earth will mourn because of him. All will look on Him in the end; the only question is whether we look now, in saving sorrow, or then, in hopeless terror.
As One Laments for an Only Son
And what does the look produce? Not terror only, but mourning: a deep, true grief over the One they wounded. They will lament for him as one laments for an only son, and there will be a bitter cry for him like the bitter cry for a firstborn. The death of an only son was the bitterest grief the ancient world knew; and that is the grief the looking produces, the heart broken open over the Pierced One. The chapter goes on to picture it spreading through the whole community, clan by clan, each apart: the royal household of David by itself, and their wives by themselves; the family of Nathan by itself, and their wives by themselves; every clan mourning by itself (12:12–14). It is a sorrow at once national and intensely personal, each soul mourning alone before the Pierced One.
The image the LORD chooses for the depth of the mourning is the most piercing grief a human heart can know. As one laments for an only son … like the bitter cry for a firstborn. In a world without hospitals or pensions, an only son was a man’s whole future, his name, his hope, his security in old age; to lose him was to lose everything at once, and the grief of it was proverbial for the deepest of all sorrows. And there is a terrible fitness in the figure, for the One pierced is in truth an only Son: the only-begotten Son of the Father, given up to the spear. When we look upon the Pierced One and mourn, we are mourning over the death of the Father’s only Son, slain by our sin. The God who once stayed Abraham’s hand over his only son Isaac did not, in the end, spare His own; the ram caught in the thicket can serve as a picture of the day when there would be no substitute for the Substitute, and the Father’s only Son would be the Lamb. We mourn for Him as for an only son, because He is the only Son, and our sin is why He died.
This is the true shape of evangelical repentance, and it is worth pausing on, for it guards against errors on both sides. This mourning is not a manufactured, self-punishing display, a grief squeezed out and put on show. Yet neither should we reduce the law’s work to making people sorry they were caught. The law genuinely exposes sin and works real contrition and terror of conscience before God; the Spirit uses it to wound, and He means it to wound. But the law alone cannot give faith, comfort, or new life; left to itself, it leaves the terrified conscience in despair. Here is where the looking comes in: seeing the Pierced One and understanding, at last, whose hands those wounds are in and whose sin drove the spear. The sight of Christ crucified shows the true cost of sin and, by the gospel, creates the faith that clings to Him. Thus the Spirit uses the law to wound and the gospel to heal, turning contrition from despair into godly sorrow and refuge in the pierced Savior. This is why our Confessions teach that repentance has two parts, contrition and faith (AC XII), and why the preaching of Christ crucified does what no amount of mere moral scolding can do: held up before the eyes of sinners, the Pierced One draws out the bitter, healing grief of those who see what their sin has done to the Son of God, and mourn, and are not left alone in their mourning. And the Spirit of grace, poured out, is the One who opens the eyes to look and softens the heart to mourn; the repentance itself is His gift.
There is one more feature of this mourning worth marking: that it is at once a whole people’s grief and each person’s own. The prophet sees the land mourning clan by clan, and within each clan the men apart and the women apart: a sorrow that sweeps through the entire community and yet is borne by each soul alone. Repentance is like that. It is never merely a private transaction, for we are mourning a sin that is the whole world’s and a Savior who died for all; and yet no one can do it for us, and no crowd can carry us through it. Each must look upon the Pierced One for himself, and mourn for himself, alone before the cross, owning that it was his own sin that drove the spear. The Church mourns together over the crucified Lord, and the Supper gathers the whole family to that mourning and that comfort; and still each communicant comes in his own heart to look, and to grieve, and to be washed. The grief is shared; the looking is each man’s own.
A Fountain Opened
And the mourning does not end in mourning. The very next words, opening the thirteenth chapter, turn the grief into cleansing: In that day there will be a fountain opened up for the dynasty of David and the people of Jerusalem to cleanse them from sin and impurity (13:1). Mark the order, for it is the order of the gospel itself: first the Pierced One, then the looking, then the mourning, and then a fountain, opened not by the tears but by the piercing. The sight of the crucified breaks the heart in repentance, and the broken heart finds, opened before it, a fountain for the very sin that broke it. And where is the fountain opened? Read canonically, the answer is plain: it is opened by the piercing. The same spear that pierced the side of the Lord Jesus brought forth, John tells us, a sudden flow of blood and water, and from the death of the pierced Savior has flowed ever since the cleansing that washes the world.
That detail of the blood and the water is one the old teachers of the Church loved to ponder. When the spear opened the side of the Lord Jesus, blood and water flowed out immediately (John 19:34), and the Church has long seen in that double stream the double gift that flows from the cross: the blood that atones and the water that cleanses, and, pictured in them, the two sacraments, the Supper and Baptism, both flowing from the wounded side. As Eve was once taken from the side of the sleeping Adam, the old teachers said, so the Church, the bride of the last Adam, was brought forth from the opened side of the Lord Jesus as He slept in death upon the cross. We need not press the figure further than Scripture warrants, but the heart of it is sure. Zechariah’s fountain is the cleansing opened by the death of Christ; Holy Baptism is the divinely appointed washing by which that cleansing is personally delivered to the believer; and in the Supper the cup gives us the very blood that was shed for the forgiveness of sins. The fountain of our cleansing was opened by a spear, and from the pierced side of the crucified Son there flows the blood that washes away the guilt of the world. The wound that killed Him became the well that saves us.
Notice what the fountain is for: to cleanse them from sin and impurity. It cleanses both the guilt of sin and the pollution of it: the double cure the gospel works, the sin forgiven and the sinner washed, justification and sanctification flowing from one pierced source. The believer sings it rightly who sings of a fountain filled with blood drawn from the wounded side, in which the guilty are washed clean. For the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:7): not some of it, not the lighter sins while the darker remain, but all of it, however scarlet. The fountain is opened: not a private spring for a favored few, but a fountain flung open to the whole dynasty of David and all the people of Jerusalem, and through them to the world: opened wide, free, inexhaustible, offered to every sinner. They looked on Him whom they pierced and mourned; and the very piercing they mourned had opened the fountain that would wash their sin away.
And we must hear how wide and how free this fountain is, for the trembling conscience needs to hear it. It is a fountain opened: not a guarded cistern doled out by the cupful to the deserving, but a spring flung open to all comers, to the whole dynasty of David and every inhabitant of Jerusalem, and through them to the ends of the earth. It is to cleanse them from sin and impurity: from the foulest sin and the deepest stain, not the small sins only while the great ones go unwashed. The fountain never runs dry, and no sin is too scarlet for it; the apostle’s word stands over it: the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:7). This is the answer to every despairing soul who fears his sin too great to be forgiven: the fountain that flowed from the side of the Son of God has no bottom and no fence, and the very people who pierced Him are the first invited to wash, as Peter would preach at Pentecost to the very city that had crucified Him. If the blood that the spear released can cleanse the men who drove the spear, there is no sinner alive it cannot make clean.
Strike the Shepherd
But we have not yet heard the most staggering word of all, and it tells us who it was that drove the sword. “Awake, sword, against my shepherd, against the man who is my associate,” says the LORD who rules over all. “Strike the shepherd that the flock may be scattered; I will turn my hand against the insignificant ones” (13:7). The sword is summoned, and it is the LORD who rules over all who summons it, against His own Shepherd. We have learned through the last two sessions to see the cross as the work of wicked men, of a betrayer’s kiss and a contemptuous price; and so it was. But here we are shown the deeper thing beneath it: the sword that fell on the Shepherd was the sword of divine justice, and the hand that drew it was the hand of God. The striking of the Shepherd was not merely a crime permitted; it was a sacrifice required, the sword of the LORD falling upon the Substitute in the place of the sheep.
We should let the full weight of this settle, for it carries us into the deepest mystery of the cross. It is easy, and true, to say that wicked men killed the Lord Jesus: Judas betrayed Him, the priests condemned Him, Pilate sentenced Him, the soldiers nailed Him. But Zechariah lifts the curtain on what was happening beneath the visible crime, and what he shows is awful and gracious at once: it was the LORD who rules over all who summoned the sword, the LORD who struck His own Shepherd. Isaiah had said the same, the LORD desired to crush him and make him ill (Isaiah 53:10), and the Lord Jesus Himself spoke of the cup the Father had given Him to drink. The cross was no mere miscarriage of justice that God reluctantly allowed; it was a sacrifice that God Himself required and Himself provided, the sword of His justice against sin falling, by His own determined counsel, upon the willing Substitute. The Father did not merely permit the striking of the Son; in the deepest sense, the Father gave the Son, and the sword that fell was His.
And mark whom the sword is summoned against: my shepherd … the man who is my associate. The word rendered associate is a rare and weighty one. Outside this verse it appears only in the Law, in Leviticus, for a fellow member of the covenant people, one who stands on the same footing as another. Here the LORD uses it of the man He calls His own shepherd: One who stands beside the LORD as His peer. The word alone does not prove the doctrine, but the Church, reading it with the pierced One of the chapter before and in the full light of the New Testament, has rightly heard in it the deity of the Son. The Shepherd is no mere man, no mere prophet, but the One who stands at the LORD’s side, true God of true God, who took our flesh. And it is this One, the LORD’s own associate, against whom the sword of the LORD is summoned, that the sheep might be spared. When the Shepherd is struck, the flock is scattered; and the Lord Jesus, on the very night He was betrayed, took this verse upon His own lips and applied it to Himself: This night you will all fall away because of me, for it is written: “I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered” (Matthew 26:31). He knew Himself to be the struck Shepherd, struck by the sword of the Father’s justice, and He foretold that His little flock would scatter that night, as they did. And in the same breath He added a promise: But after I am raised, I will go ahead of you into Galilee (Matthew 26:32). The scattered sheep would not be abandoned; the risen Shepherd would gather His scattered disciples after the striking was done.
And the last line of the verse must not be lost: I will turn my hand against the insignificant ones. The NET reads it as a hand of judgment, and the Hebrew allows either “against” or “upon.” The verses that follow show what that hand is doing: the flock passes through the fire, I will refine them like silver is refined, and it ends with the LORD saying, These are my people, and the people answering, The LORD is my God (13:9). The hand that falls on the little ones is the hand that refines them and claims them as His own. When the Shepherd was struck, the sheep scattered; and how they scattered that night, the disciples fleeing into the dark, Peter denying with oaths, every one of them gone. By every appearance the little flock was finished, blown apart by the blow that fell on their Shepherd. But the Shepherd had promised to go ahead of them, and so it proved. The risen Shepherd sought out His scattered sheep one by one: He sent word, Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee. They will see me there (Matthew 28:10); He found them behind their locked doors; He restored Peter by the lake. The scattering was real, but it was not the end, for the Shepherd who was struck rose to gather the little ones who had fled. The hand that struck the Shepherd turns to refine and to gather the flock.
King over All the Earth
The fourteenth chapter rises to the great day of the LORD and the final triumph of His reign. The nations gather one last time against the city; the LORD goes forth to fight; On that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives which lies to the east of Jerusalem (14:4). We will not press these verses into a literal program of troop movements and rebuilt cities, as some do; we read them as the prophets gave them, as the grand and symbolic portrait of the LORD’s final coming to judge His enemies and save His people. It is fitting, though, that the prophet names the Mount of Olives, for it was from that very mount that the Lord Jesus ascended, and the angels promised He would come back in the same way He went. The New Testament does not quote this verse, but read canonically, the day of the LORD that Zechariah sees fittingly directs us to the Day of the Lord Jesus, His coming again in glory.
We read the day of the LORD here as we have read it through the whole volume: on more than one horizon, and finally fulfilled in Christ. There is no profit in turning these verses into a map of future troop movements, plotting the nations and the earthquake and the splitting hill onto a literal geography of the last days, as though Zechariah were a war correspondent filing his report ahead of time. The prophet is painting, in the broad symbolic strokes of apocalyptic, the grand and certain truth that the LORD will come in person to judge the gathered enemies of His people and to save His own. That the prophet sets the LORD’s feet upon the Mount of Olives is a quiet wonder, for it was from that very mount that the Lord Jesus was taken up, with the angels’ promise: This same Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will come back in the same way you saw him go into heaven (Acts 1:11). The day Zechariah saw, when the LORD comes forth to fight for His people and stands upon the mount, is best read as the day of the Lord Jesus’ return in glory, the certain hope toward which the whole groaning creation leans.
And out of that day flow living waters: living waters will flow out from Jerusalem (14:8), a picture that may echo in the river of the water of life, the Spirit poured out and the gospel going forth from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. And then the climax of the whole book, indeed the climax toward which the whole of prophecy strains: The LORD will then be king over all the earth. In that day the LORD will be seen as one with a single name (14:9). The Hebrew echoes Israel’s great confession, the Shema: “the LORD will be one, and His name one.” Here is the end of the story: not a patch of restored real estate, not an earthly throne in an earthly capital, but the universal reign of the LORD over all the earth, every rival put down, one LORD acknowledged and one name confessed. We know His throne. The risen Lord Jesus is seated at the right hand of God, King over all, and God has given Him the name above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Read in the light of the New Testament, the one LORD of Zechariah’s vision is confessed in the one Lord Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Spirit is the one God; and the day is coming when His reign over all the earth, now hidden and contested, will be revealed and unopposed, and God will be all in all.
Holy to the LORD
The book ends with a vision of the consummation so beautiful it is easily passed over. In that day, Zechariah says, the survivors of all the nations that came against Jerusalem will go up year by year to worship the King, the LORD who rules over all (14:16): the very nations that had been enemies, gathered now as worshipers, the Gentile ingathering brought to its glad and final end. And then the strangest and loveliest detail of all. On that day the bells of the horses will bear the inscription “Holy to the LORD.” … Every cooking pot in Jerusalem and Judah will become holy in the sight of the LORD who rules over all (14:20–21). The words Holy to the LORD (rendered in Exodus “Holiness to the LORD”) were engraved on the golden plate worn on the forehead of the high priest alone, the holiest inscription in Israel, reserved for the holiest man as he ministered before the LORD. And Zechariah sees a day when those words will be stamped on the bells of the horses and on the common cooking pots in every kitchen.
This is one of the great pictures of the world to come, and it is worth letting it work upon the imagination. In the old order, holiness was concentrated and guarded: one inscription, on one golden plate, on one high priest, ministering in one holy place. The whole architecture of the temple was a system of fences, separating the holy from the common, the clean from the unclean, the priest from the people. And Zechariah sees a day when all the fences come down, not because holiness has been cheapened but because it has flooded everything: the bells of the horses, the pots in the kitchen, the most ordinary objects of daily life, all stamped with the inscription once reserved for the high priest alone. There is a foretaste of it even now, for the gospel has already begun to abolish the old divide: the believer is a priest, and his common labor and his daily bread and his ordinary callings are made holy when they are offered in faith to the LORD. But the full flood is still to come, in the new creation, when there will be nothing left that is not Holy to the LORD, and the whole world will be His temple.
What does it mean? It means the end of the long division between the sacred and the common, because in that day everything will be holy. There will be no corner of creation, no object so ordinary, that it is not stamped Holy to the LORD; the whole world will be His temple, every cooking pot as holy as the bowls before the altar and the high priest’s turban. This is the new creation, the world to come, where God dwells with His people and the curse is gone and there is no more uncleanness anywhere: where, the prophet says, there will no longer be a Canaanite in the house of the LORD who rules over all (14:21), no more the trafficker in unclean things. The book that began with a call to a small and discouraged people to rebuild a modest temple ends with the whole creation made a temple, every common thing made holy, every nation gathered to worship the King. From the bells of the horses to the throne of God, all of it at last is Holy to the LORD.
Gathering the Threads
These three chapters are the summit of Zechariah, and they are crowded with the cross and the glory. The LORD defends His people against the massed nations, but the heart of the oracle is what He works within them: He pours out a spirit of grace and supplication, and they look to Him whom they have pierced and lament as for an only son. The pierced One is the LORD Himself, mourned as another: the crucified Son of God, into whose side the soldier drove the spear. And out of that piercing flows a fountain, opened to cleanse from sin and impurity, the blood and water from the wounded side that cleanses the very sinners who pierced Him. The sword that struck the Shepherd was the LORD’s own sword, fallen upon His own associate, His peer, the Substitute struck in the place of the sheep; and the scattered little ones were refined and gathered home again by the hand that struck Him.
And all of it is the things concerning Himself. The Pierced One is the Lord Jesus; the fountain is the cleansing His blood has opened, delivered to us in Baptism; the struck Shepherd whom the Father’s sword struck is the same Lord Jesus, true God and the LORD’s own associate, who took the verse upon His lips the night He was betrayed; and the King who will reign over all the earth, the one LORD with a single name, is confessed in the risen Lord Jesus, at whose name every knee shall bow. Zechariah, the Apocalypse of the Old Testament, has shown us the whole gospel in vision: the Branch and the priest-king, the lowly King on the donkey, the Shepherd sold for thirty pieces, and now the Pierced One, the opened fountain, the struck Shepherd, and the reigning King, ending in a world where the bells of the horses and the pots in every kitchen are stamped Holy to the LORD. We look upon Him whom we have pierced, and we mourn; and we find, opened before us, the fountain that washes us clean; and we wait for the day when the One we pierced shall be King over all the earth, and every common thing shall be holy, and God shall be all in all.
For Discussion
These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.
They will look to me, the one they have pierced. They will lament for him (12:10). How do the shifting pronouns, me and yet him, open a window into the life of God? What does it mean that the One pierced is the LORD Himself, and yet is mourned as another?
The law genuinely exposes sin and works real contrition, but it cannot give faith or comfort; the mourning of 12:10 comes from looking upon the Pierced One. How is this the true shape of evangelical repentance, contrition and faith together? Why does the preaching of Christ crucified break and heal hearts in a way that mere moral scolding never can?
In that day there will be a fountain opened up … to cleanse them from sin and impurity (13:1), set right after the mourning but opened by the piercing, not by the tears. How does the order (the Pierced One, the looking, the mourning, the fountain) trace the shape of the gospel? What is the double cure the fountain works (John 19:34; 1 John 1:7), and how is that cleansing delivered to us in Baptism?
Awake, sword, against my shepherd … Strike the shepherd (13:7), and it is the LORD who rules over all who summons the sword against His own Shepherd. How does this show the cross to be a sacrifice required, not only a crime permitted? Why does it matter that the sword fell by the hand of God?
The Shepherd is the man who is my associate (13:7), the LORD’s own peer. How does this, with the pierced One of 12:10, point to the deity of the Son? What comfort is there in knowing it was God’s own equal who was struck for us?
The LORD will then be king over all the earth. In that day the LORD will be seen as one with a single name (14:9), ending in Holy to the LORD on the bells of the horses (14:20). Why do we read this as the reign of the risen Lord Jesus and the new creation, rather than an earthly kingdom? How does the whole world becoming holy answer the longing of the book?
Looking Ahead
With Zechariah we have climbed the highest Christological peak of the Twelve; now we come down to the last book, and the last word of the Old Testament. After Zechariah comes Malachi, the final prophet, speaking to a people grown weary and cynical perhaps a century after the temple was rebuilt, when the first flush of the return had faded into routine and complaint. The priests offer the LORD their blemished, leftover sacrifices and find His worship a weariness; the people rob God and weary Him with their words and ask, with a shrug, How? And yet Malachi opens with a word that holds the whole covenant together: “I have shown love to you,” says the LORD. In the next session we hear the LORD’s tender opening declaration of love met by a people’s tired contempt, the rebuke of a careless priesthood and a profaned table, and the wounding of the covenant of marriage: the last prophet calling a jaded people back to the God who still loves them. We turn from the glory of Zechariah to the weariness of Malachi, and toward the silence that will follow.
Before the next session, read Malachi 1–2: the LORD’s opening declaration, “I have shown love to you,” and the people’s cynical “How have you shown love to us?”; the rebuke of the priests who offer blind and lame and sick animals on the LORD’s altar and treat His table as if it is of no importance; the promise that “from the east to the west my name will be great among the nations”; and the LORD’s anger at the profaning of the covenant of marriage and His word, “I hate divorce.” Ask what it means that the last age of the Old Testament was an age of weariness and cynicism, and how the LORD answers a tired and contemptuous people.
Closing Prayer
O LORD who rules over all, who pours out a spirit of grace and supplication, turn our eyes to look upon Him whom we have pierced. We confess that it was our sin that drove the spear, our transgressions for which the sword awoke against Your Shepherd, Your own associate and equal. Let Your law show us our sin in truth; then break our hearts with the sight of the crucified and heal them with the wonder of His wounds, that our mourning over Him may be the mourning that leads to life.
We bless You that out of the pierced side of our Lord Jesus there flowed a fountain opened to cleanse from sin and impurity, in which the very ones who pierced Him may be washed whiter than snow. We thank You that the sword of Your justice fell upon the willing Shepherd in our place, that we, the scattered little ones, might be gathered home by the same hand that struck Him. Keep us in the washing You gave us in our Baptism; cleanse us from all our sin; and bring us to the day when He shall be King over all the earth, when the LORD will be one and His name one, and the bells of the horses and the pots in every kitchen shall be holy to You. Until that day, keep us looking on the Pierced One, and mourning, and washed; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.