The prophecy today from Zechariah is a bold one, one that no person would have dared to predict on his own without divine inspiration. When Zechariah wrote, the people of Judah had just returned from Exile at the mercy of great Persia; they had re-built the Temple, and as we heard in last week’s readings, it was a meager replica of the original. Judged by appearances, they were a tiny, insignificant nation, surviving at the pleasure of far more dominant civilizations.
And yet, here Zechariah is, prophesying that all peoples, including the mighty nations, will seek Jerusalem out and look to the Jews for guidance and wisdom, as the people who uniquely know the LORD. It is a stunning vision.
The question is, did the vision ever come true, or are we still awaiting the prophecy’s fulfillment? Who could these other nations, these mighty peoples be? These nations are all of us! Italians and Greeks, English and Irish, French and German, Latin Americans, Southern Indians, I could go on and on and on. If you come from any great nation that turned to Christianity, then your nation, so to speak, journeyed to Jerusalem to seek the LORD of Israel. For when Zechariah speaks about men of every nationality grabbing the edge of a Jew’s garment, begging to encounter God, the Person who should come to mind for us is none other than Jesus, the Jewish Messiah and the Savior of the world.
The saint we celebrate today, Saint Jerome, recalls our Jewish roots in a powerful way. The Church already had made the crucial decision to keep the Jewish Scriptures as part of God’s inspired word to His people; following the words of Jesus Himself, the ancient Church rightly saw the New Testament not as replacing the Old Testament, but as fulfilling it; each illuminates the other.
But it was Saint Jerome who persuaded the Church not just to keep the Old Testament, but even to use the version of these texts that go back more directly to the Hebrew language itself. Jerome studied with Jewish Christians and with rabbis in the Holy Land to produce his masterful translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Latin.
But you do need to be a brilliant, saintly Scripture scholar to have a deep connection to our Jewish roots. The prayer that is most beloved for us at Holy Cross Family Ministries, the Rosary, has its foundation in the Hebrew Psalter. For instance, the very reason that there are 150 Hail Marys in the original three sets of Rosary mysteries is that there are 150 Psalms. When we pray the Rosary, we are in many ways praying according to the ancient rhythms that would have shaped the prayer life of the Holy Family.
Our world today suffers the agony of so many forms of religious persecution and antisemitism in particular. Our Church has its own terrible history at times of oppression of the Jewish people. We do well as Catholics today to find inspiration from the bold prophet Zechariah and the great Father Jerome and to lovingly embrace our Divine Messiah and His Jewish brothers and sisters in our world.