For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 4 – Zechariah 9:9-12 (Related)

As you will have noticed, I like to take our OT passages as a whole (and often as more than a whole as we place the allotted verses in a larger context). But this week I was struck by one phrase, and decided it was worth exploring. The phrase comes in v.12: ‘prisoners of hope’. What’s all that about then? Isn’t hope a good thing? How then can it imprison us? There’s something important here to explore, particularly from the context in which we’re all living at the moment.

To understand the phrase, we do, of course, have to look at the rest of the passage. It’s a prophetic oracle of restoration after exile, but the language is important. It uses what’s called the Zion tradition, a belief among earlier prophets that God would ride out as a mighty warrior to protect Jerusalem from her enemies. You can find this kind of language in the Psalms, notably  2, 46, 47 and 48, as well as in some prophetic books. When the Holy City is under threat God will rouse himself and come to her rescue, scattering and punishing her enemies and renewing his reign over them. This is the kind of language used in this passage, although of course the strange reference to donkeys makes us think immediately of Palm Sunday, a thought to which we shall return.

Well, that’s interesting, but it doesn’t explain why hope might become a prison. Here the context might help us. The nation, not her enemies, has been scattered. Jerusalem has been smashed down, and the nation has suffered abject defeat and captivity in exile. And contrary to expectations God apparently did not lift and finger to help: indeed many prophets have said that it was God himself who did the defeating and scattering.

And yet the Zion theology was still alive and strong. People were still hoping that the Divine Warrior might yet wake up and rescue them by smashing up their enemies. It is this very hope which keeps them prisoners, says Zechariah. The expectation that God will do what he has always done will not die, and so they are kept imprisoned, and, significantly, prevented from seeing any other outcome. They have put God in a box, and in so doing have boxed themselves in. In fact you can see that this hope has survived into the NT when the disciples ask Jesus, just before his ascension, ‘Are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?’ (Acts 1:6). Jesus has tried to subvert this Zion Warrior tradition by the style of his entry to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, but like many the disciples were kept prisoner by their hope, and simply hadn’t got the message that God was acting though Jesus in a new and different way.

This raises an important question for us. What from the past might be imprisoning us, and preventing us from expecting that God will do something new and different? I can remember as a keen young charismatic in the 80s hearing someone commenting that the frequent charismatic prayer ‘Lord, do it again!’ was a much less biblical prayer than ‘Lord, do something new!’ So often our imagination cannot stretch beyond more of the same, a repeat performance of what we have seen in the past. It is this limited vision which can make us into prisoners.

At a time when we are all longing to ‘get back to normal’ this might just be an important word from God to his Church. Zechariah describes this prison of hope as a ‘waterless pit’, a place of dryness, frustration and dashed expectations. God’s desire is to return us to a ‘fortress’, a strong place from where we can experience safety, confidence, and more blessing than ever before.