Zechariah and Eddie Vedder in the Desert

So they made signs, asking his father what he wished him to be called. He asked for a tablet and wrote, “John is his name,” and all were amazed. Immediately his mouth was opened, his tongue freed, and he spoke blessing God. (Luke 1:62-64)

Zechariah probably qualifies as the most famous priest in the Bible. Perhaps all we priests should take note how Zechariah spent so much time completely mute.

And all husbands maybe should note this: The boy’s name? It’s what she said.

The coming of Christ, however, loosens tongues. Faith bears witness. As we pray at every Mass during this final week of Advent: St. John the Baptist was born “to sing of Christ’s coming.”

We can only imagine the quality of the holy prophet’s singing voice. Any ideas what modern singer might have a voice like St. John the Baptist had?

Johnny Cash? Ray Charles? Roy Orbison? Placido Domingo? Springsteen?

I say Eddie Vedder.

The Christmas the Lord has Planned

Every year, at Holy Mass on December 19th, we read from Luke 1. And we confront the question: Why did Zechariah get punished for asking the Archangel Gabriel a question about John the Baptist’s birth, but Mary did not get punished for asking about how Jesus could be born?

And the answer is?…

–Zechariah—a wise, old priest—should have known better than to doubt.

–St. John the Baptist got conceived according to the traditional, birds-and-the-bees method, so Zechariah’s question was petulant. Whereas Mary asked a perfectly honest question.

–Zechariah was a chatterbox who talked too much anyway.

Remember how, two years ago, a lot of people worried about the Mayan apocalypse? And fifteen years ago, a lot of people worried that Y2K would crash everyone’s computer? 1,015 years ago, most of Western civilization sat waiting for the world to end at the turn of the first millennium.

I don’t mean to make fun of any of these people. In a way, they had the right idea. Zechariah failed to give God credit for being able to do something totally unexpected.

Do I know what Christmas is supposed to be like for me spiritually? Aren’t I supposed to have such-and-such feelings, such-and-such ‘faith experiences’ at Christmas? That’s the way it always is. It’s traditional. Christmas is a time for my traditional emotions.

For me personally, Christmas is traditionally a time to be tired and out-of-sorts. Because I have a cold. Because Our Lady decided to appear to St. Juan Diego in December instead of July. Thereby turning Advent from difficult to practically impossible for the Martinsville/Rocky Mount/Roanoke-Catholic priest to manage.

Traditional spiritual experiences.

But what if these are not what the Lord has planned for us for Christmas AD 2014? What if this Christmas will involve spiritual graces for me unlike any I have ever received before?

Lord, help us open ourselves up to the future that You have planned for us! Open us up to the Christmas that You have planned for us! We don’t know how to plan like You do. What You have in mind is much better, much more interesting, and much more wonderful than anything we have ever thought of.

Merry Christmas, Scrubs!

Every morning, the Church greets the dawn with prayer. One of the daily morning prayers of the Church: the canticle which Zechariah sang when he learned that the Christ had come. Monks, nuns, priests, and many lay people, too: we all sing or recite this same song as part of our prayers every morning.

“Blessed be the Lord Who has come to His people and raised up a mighty Savior, fulfilling His promises to the prophets.”

Zechariah’s song expresses the content of God’s promise in a particularly eloquent fashion. The Lord promised to free His people from the hands of enemies, so as to be able to “worship without fear, holy and righteous in God’s sight.” The newborn Savior will make this possible for us: to worship God without fear, standing before Him in holiness.

This is mankind’s peace, this upright, unburdened worship of the Almighty. We hear in the Christmas gospel about how the angels sang: “Glory to God, peace to people of good will.” This is salvation: worshiping our Maker with a heart at rest, with a tranquil conscience.

Ancient Israel had many enemies, but the true enemy is sin, falseness–interior emptiness that leads only to death. Sin makes it impossible to worship our Creator and Lord fearlessly. Because truth is truth, and the eyes of God see everything. If we are not in a state of genuine honesty with ourselves, we will never be in a state of real peace.

Christ has come precisely to set us free from the clutches of this, our greatest enemy: our self-destructive dishonesty with ourselves. Our foolish, grandiose pride. The wise among us have always declared, “Thy first duty is to know thyself!” And no goal has ever proven more impossible for us to achieve.

Christ did not come to the earth to tell us that we are wonderful, that we are hot-shots, that we have it all together. Because we aren’t, and we don’t. What He came to do is: die for us, out of love for all of us incorrigible sinners.

So that we can stand fearlessly before God Almighty and admit the truth: We are not perfect. We are not divine. We are miserable scrubs. We are helpless and lost without God’s help. Christ has liberated us from our laughable pretenses by His beautiful demonstration of the fact that He loves pathetic scrubs. He loves hapless losers.

He’s really only interested in losers and scrubs. The perfect, beautiful people He leaves to their own devices, to enjoy their supposed awesomeness in their own realm of self-sufficiency. Which is actually a kingdom of broken mirrors and disappointment that never ends.

But, for us feckless bumblers, the love of Jesus can give us the courage to know ourselves in the truth. He shed His blood for our sins, so all we have to do is confess them, in the great act of Christian honesty which fulfills all the ancient prophecies. ‘Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ ‘Child, your faith has saved you! Your sins are forgiven. Go your way.’

Then we can worship God without fear! We can know the thrilling peace of a day lived completely in the truth. And we can watch with joy as the dawn from on high breaks upon us, in all its glory.

Praised be the Lord Jesus Christ, now and forever and ever and ever.

Zechariah and the Widow: Justice!

Tomb of Zechariah, son of Jehoida, in the Kidron Valley

Today’s gospel reading at Holy Mass offers us a good warm-up for Sunday’s gospel. Today we hear the Lord Jesus refer to

Zechariah, who died between the altar and the temple building.

Let’s clarify a couple things: First, apparently the altar for animal sacrifice stood outside the original Temple of Solomon. The burning flesh of the lambs and other animals rose from the courtyard up to the heavens.

Second, of which Zechariah does the Lord speak here? How many Zechariahs appear in the Holy Scriptures? 1. Zechariah, father of ________. John the Baptist! 2. Zechariah, son of Berechiah, who prophesied when the Israelites returned from exile in Babylon. And 3. Zechariah, son of Jehoida, who lived 2 ½ centuries before that.

Zechariah, son of Jehoida, condemned the people of Jerusalem for worshiping pagan idols. He warned the people that the Lord had abandoned them—because they had abandoned the Lord. Instead of listening to his righteous warnings, they stoned him to death in the temple courtyard.

Now, the connection with Sunday’s gospel reading is this: When Zechariah lay dying, he said, “May the Lord see and avenge.”

We can see why Zechariah would have said that. Here he was, a faithful teacher of the Law of Moses, defending the honor of God in the Lord’s own Temple—and he meets a cruel death at the hands of bad people solely because he was trying to open the door to God for them. So he prayed that the world would not descend into total meaningless chaos, but rather that the Lord act to restore justice.

This sounds like the widow we will hear about in Jesus’ parable on Sunday, the widow who pleads insistently to the judge: “Render a just decision for me against my adversary!”

We live in the great age of mercy, when all sins can be forgiven because of the blood Christ shed for us. Injustice still holds sway on earth; mercy reigns above. The mercy of God gives us hope for ourselves, in spite of all our own injustices.

But what also gives us hope is the truth that moved the praying hearts of Zechariah and the widow in the parable. The reign of injustice on earth will end. God waits for the repentance of all He has chosen. Then justice will be done. All wrongs will be righted. The meaningless chaos of a world that kills the gentle messengers of God—it will be transformed by the divine Judge into a kingdom of true and eternal peace.

Conditions for Belief

The gospel tells us that Zechariah lived a holy, upright life. The angel came to visit him while he faithfully fulfilled his priestly duties. Gabriel found Elizabeth’s husband in the Temple, the most splendidly divine place imaginable. The humble priest busied himself burning incense, praying, surrounded by crowds of pious people praying in the Temple court outside.

In other words, the archangel came to the place most frequented by the holy heroes of Advent, the place where they came to await the fulfillment of the Lord’s ancient promises. Where Gabriel appeared to Zechariah, everyone knew Elijah was to come again, to direct the hearts of children to their fathers and to prepare a people fit for the Lord.

The angel came to this most believable of settings, and proceeded to tell Zechariah something which hardly even defied the laws of nature. You and your wife will have a son!

Wonderful news, yes. Another instance of God’s fruitfulness, to which the Old Testament had borne so much witness through the centuries. But the rules of the birds and the bees would remain intact. Zechariah was not asked to believe anything too outlandish. Just that he and his wife would have an unexpected son.

Meanwhile, the archangel visited the Blessed Virgin in a much less holy city, in a part of the country as pagan as it was Jewish. Nazareth has a great name now. But at the time, as we know from reading the gospels, the Jews thought of the town as an unmentionable backwater, in a region over-run by distasteful foreigners who cared only about commerce.

And what Gabriel proposed to Mary demanded a much greater leap of faith. He told her that something would happen which had never happened before. She asked the angel an honest question, got an enormously mysterious answer, and humbly submitted.

Inconvenient and Uneasy

At first, St. John’s father Zechariah did not believe that his elderly wife could bear a son. But then, when Zechariah showed his faith and named the boy John as the angel had told him to do, the Lord loosened Zechariah’s tongue. The old priest had the privilege of singing one of the original Gospel canticles.

Zechariah sang that his son would be the herald of the Savior. And that the Lord would come to His people and set them free. The Lord will set us free to “worship Him without fear, holy and righteous in His sight, all the days of our lives.”

For freedom Christ has set us free. Every morning, to greet the dawn, the Church sings Zechariah’s canticle. But we sing it louder and prouder now, during our Fortnight for Freedom.

Independence Day draws near, and our thoughts turn to the Founding Fathers of our nation. When we hear the phrase in Zechariah’s canticle about God “setting us free from our enemies,” an echo sounds in our minds. We think of the war against the British which our forefathers fought and won.

Mother Helps the Timid

Zechariah prophesied that the Messiah would enter Jerusalem seated on a male colt, the foal of a donkey.

The time came for this prophecy’s fulfillment. St. Matthew recounts that the Lord Jesus had his disciples bring to Him both the young colt AND the mother donkey.*

Christ knew that the trip up to Jerusalem would be too much for the little animal to manage by himself. The colt would need the comfort of its mother’s presence. It would be a pretty intimidating ride up to the city. So the Lord had the mother walk alongside the colt.

Guess what? The Lord knows that we are, each of us, a little feeble of foot. The trip up to Jerusalem would be too much for us to handle individually. Contemplate the Passion of the Son of God? Terrifying. I would stop dead in my tracks, and turn around and make a break for Bethphage.

The Lord does not leave us in solitude to enter the dark holy of holies of our religion. He leads us in with our mother, the Church, right beside. We make our way through the breathtaking and excruciating events of Holy Week together, the Church united in prayer throughout the world.

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*Click HERE for a full apologetic exegesis regarding this detail.

Punishment May Be Slow, But…

Roman poet Horace

I neglected something very important in my earlier account of the martyrdom of the prophet Zechariah, son of Jehoiada.

(By the way, it is not the same person as the prophet Zechariah who has his own book in the Old Testament, or the priest Zechariah, father of John the Baptist. There are three different Zechariahs in the Scriptures.)

Anyway, I failed to recount Zechariah’s dying words, which he uttered as King Joash’s henchmen were killing him in the Temple:

“May the Lord see and avenge.”

Just in case you don’t remember Horace’s Third Ode word-for-word, allow me to call these lines to mind:

raro antecedentem scelestum
deseruit pede Poena claudo

“Although punishment may walk with a lame foot, she rarely allows the guilty man to run ahead.” (Tip of the hat to Fr. Haydock.)

May God give us the grace to repent of our sins and escape liability for the blood of the prophets! May His mercy allow us to run ahead of the punishment we deserve!

Also: If you missed it last year, click here for a message on the occasion of the Memorial of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque.

Temple of Silence

Woe to you who build the memorials of the prophets whom your fathers killed…This generation will be charged with their blood, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah who died between the altar and the temple building. (Luke 11:47, 51)

Here is a line from a recent hit by a young lady called “Pink:”

“The quiet scares me ’cause it screams the truth.”

Maybe someday Pink will be called “the artist formerly known as Pink.” Apparently, even now, you are actually supposed to spell the name P!nk.

Regardless, she has expressed an important fact: In silence, the Truth speaks.

Tomb of Zechariah, son of Jehoiada, in the Kidron Valley

In the days of old, the Lord’s Temple in Jerusalem was the special sanctuary of truth-speaking silence.

The prophet Jehoaida convinced King Joash to raise money to maintain the Temple and keep it in good repair.

After Jehoiada died, however, the king and his princes forsook true worship and turned to idols.

Jehoida’s son Zechariah tried to call the people back to the Lord:

Why are you transgressing the Lord’s commands, so that you cannot prosper? Because you have abandoned the Lord, He has abandoned you. (II Chronicles 24:20)

For this, the king had Zechariah killed in the Temple court, and his blood stained the stones.

When the Lord Jesus was excoriating the scribes and Pharisees, He reminded them of this cold-blooded murder. Then He went on to say:

Woe to you, scholars of the law! You have taken away the key of knowledge. You yourselves did not enter and you stopped those trying to enter.

What is the key to entering the holy Temple? What do the violent, the self-righteous, and the self-indulgent NOT have–so the door is locked to them?

The key that opens the House of God is humble, attentive silence.

Two Entries

The Triumph of Pompey by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin

His triumph had such a magnitude that, although it was distributed over two days, still the time would not suffice, but much of what had been prepared could not find a place in the spectacle, enough to dignify and adorn another triumphal procession.

Inscriptions borne in advance of the procession indicated the nations over which he triumphed. These were: Pontus, Armenia, Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, Media, Colchis, Iberia, Albania, Syria, Cilicia, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia and Palestine, Judaea, Arabia, and all the power of the pirates by sea and land which had been overthrown. Among these peoples no less than a thousand strongholds had been captured, according to the inscriptions, and cities not much under nine hundred in number, besides eight hundred piratical ships, while thirty-nine cities had been founded.

In addition to all this the inscriptions set forth that whereas the public revenues from taxes had been fifty million drachmas, they were receiving from the additions which Pompey had made to the city’s power eighty-five million, and that he was bringing into the public treasury in coined money and vessels of gold and silver twenty thousand talents, apart from the money which had been given to his soldiers, of whom the one whose share was the smallest had received fifteen hundred drachmas.

The captives led in triumph, besides the chief pirates, were the son of Tigranes the Armenian with his wife and daughter, Zosime, a wife of King Tigranes himself, Aristobulus, king of the Jews, a sister and five children of Mithridates, Scythian women, and hostages given by the Iberians, by the Albanians, and by the king of Commagene; there were also very many trophies, equal in number to all the battles in which Pompey had been victorious either in person or in the persons of his lieutenants.

Plutarch, Life of Pompey 45.

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!

Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!

Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an ass, on a colt the foal of an ass.

Zechariah 9:9