If there were an A to Z of prophets, Zechariah would be a tailor-made entry to end it. Zephaniah is all denunciation, unbridled vilification of oppressors and abusers of power. Whether found among the chosen people or the Gentiles, this kind of behaviour, he says, is unacceptable in the sight of God. Zechariah gave us a day of judgment with knobs on. No mincing matters. We’re all heading to Doomsday – and it won’t just be a book commissioned by William the Conqueror.
So it came about that the traditional Roman Catholic Requiem Mass, coloured by Verdi’s music, invests the Day of Judgment with the terror of the Dies Irae (the Day of Wrath). By contrast the temperate words of the creeds as we have them in ‘Common Worship’ and the advent themes of death, judgment, heaven and hell are sanitised versions of the day of wrath as Zechariah understood them. Cryptic and apocalyptic, Zechariah is not bed-time reading.
Modern man finds it hard to countenance the idea of a day of judgment. Yet it continues to haunt us. We can hardly avoid being aware of the shortcomings of human systems of justice. Court proceedings, jury findings and judicial sentencing have manifold imperfections. At our best we do well in seeking justice but we can never be sure we have got it right. We are just bit able to plumb the depth of personality clashes and the intricacies of human motivation and discordant society. Like democracy, adversarial legal systems are the worst form of regulating behaviour apart from all the others that have been tried.
We have an unavoidable sense that there must be a better understanding of justice prevailing somewhere. A maker who created a cosmos functioning according to exquisitely defined patterns must, it is felt, have a concern for evaluating his work. And those who do not accept the concept of a creator share this concern. If it were not for the Christian doctrine of redemption we might well feel utterly forsaken. Zephaniah does not make for comfortable reading but he is on to something.
Hazel Hill
‘Who has despised the day of small things?’ asked Zechariah. In this 80th anniversary year of the Battle of Britain we may have this question in mind when our thoughts turn to Hazel Hill. As a 13-year-old girl, dyslexic but brilliant at Maths, in 1934 she helped her scientist father, Fred, who worked in the Air Ministry, make the case for equipping Hurricanes and Spitfires with eight guns rather than four so that they would be on level terms with the BF109. Later she became a doctor. During WW2 she treated injured servicemen. Good things come in small packages.
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