READ Zechariah 4:6
[The angel] said to me, “This is the word of the LORD to Zerubbabel: Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts.”
MEDITATE
When I was a kid, it was easy for me to divide religion from politics; they were like two sides of the Red Sea, mounted in opposition with a swath of dry land between them. The Holy Spirit, I thought, could inspire great preaching or personal virtues or spiritual gifts, but not politics—and certainly not politicians. The Holy Spirit could heal individuals but not nations. The Spirit could cause us to speak in tongues but not prompt nations of a shared continent to understand each other’s tongues.
I’m not sure I was even ready to admit that the Spirit inspired social reformers—people like Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, who fought slavery tooth and nail, or Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement, or Martin Luther King Jr., who galvanized the civil rights movement.
Today, after a whole lot of living and study, I understand the work of the Spirit differently. Here’s why. After half a century of exile, the Persian Empire sent the Israelites home in 539 BCE with the mandate to rebuild Jerusalem, which the Babylonians had destroyed. The Persians also sent the exiles home with the warning not to raise a whiff of rebellion. Enter Zechariah, a prophet and political realist who directed his energies to recreating a faithful little province—Jerusalem may only have been four or five acres with four or five hundred inhabitants—that would not raise the eyebrows of Persian power.
Zechariah showed me that my tidy division between religion and politics, the Spirit and social reform, was convenient but not true—and certainly not scriptural. Zechariah plotted and planned the nation’s future with the politicians in charge. He talked religion. He talked politics. Zechariah knew that the temple would be rebuilt both Persia’s way and by God’s Spirit.
In this context of prudent optimism, Zechariah pronounced the famous words, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts.” These words were both promise and warning: King David’s distant heir, Zerubabbel, governor of the province of Yehud (Judah), would rebuild the temple, though, according to Persia’s mandate, without a trace of political ambition.
Achieving political ends without political ambition is a tricky business. Zechariah knows this, so he tells Zerubbabel to rebuild the temple, “not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit.” The work of reformation can be—should be—the work of the Spirit.
Reform, in other words—reform done right and righteously—looks awfully political, but it’s actually deeply spiritual. Let me give a more recent example. In 1989, as I enjoyed massive collections on Asian theology and (yes, of course, more importantly) freshly baked pastries and freshly brewed coffee every morning at 11 AM in the Cambridge University library, I found myself entranced by a book called The Acknowledged Christ of the Indian Renaissance, by M. M. Thomas, one of India’s foremost twentieth-century politicians. Thomas demonstrated time and again that an awareness of Jesus’s love for the poor had led to repeated reforms in India. It was not spirituality, unhinged from political and social realities, that had reshaped India, but the impact of the life and teaching of Jesus. Spiritual. Biblical. Political. Together.
I’m no politician, but I’d like to throw my hat in with social reformers who discover the Holy Spirit in the unholy world of politics—Samuel Wilberforce, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King Jr.—whose visions, like Judea in Zechariah’s day, have survived. Why not? After all, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his last speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” in a torrential thunderstorm to a thunderous crowd in the Masonic Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, under a banner that read:
GROWTH AND PROGRESS
“Not By Might, Nor By Power, But By My Spirit, Saith the LORD of HOSTS.” Zechariah 4:6
REFLECT
PRAY
Holy Spirit
I’m comfortable with clarity—if I’m honest, with clichés, too
politics and religion don’t mix
I’m happy to inhabit a world in which spiritual is mystical—even unworldly
politics and religion don’t mix
I’m satisfied with a private piety—a world apart
politics and religion don’t mix
Where then is the might?
Where then is the power?
Where then are you, Spirit?
Let me discover might in you, the Spirit
Let me experience power in you, the Spirit
Let me join the ranks of Wilberforce, Day, King
a host of poets and saints and
social reformers from ages past
Amen
