Dirty Clothes Off, Clean Robe On

A few months after Haggai promised glory for the plain new temple, the builders in Jerusalem were still hauling stones, and the prophet Zechariah had a night full of visions. He saw horses among myrtle trees and a man with a measuring line. Then he saw a courtroom.

In the middle stood Joshua the high priest, the one man who went before God for all the people. His clothes were meant to be the cleanest in Israel. (God had told Moses exactly how to make a high priest's robes, right down to the golden bells on the hem.)

But Joshua was wearing filthy, stinking clothes, the kind of dirty that makes people hold their noses.

The angel of the LORD stood in front of him. At Joshua's right hand stood Satan, whose name means "the accuser." (In a trial in those days, the accuser stood right next to the person on trial, close enough to point.) The Bible does not tell us what Satan said. It does not need to. Anyone could see the clothes.

Then the LORD spoke, and the one who got the scolding was Satan.

"The LORD rebuke you, Satan! The LORD who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Isn't this man a burning stick snatched out of the fire?"

A stick yanked out of a campfire is black and smoking at one end. But someone wanted it enough to reach into the flames and grab it. That was Joshua and all God's people, pulled out of Babylon after seventy years.

The angel turned to those standing nearby. "Take off his filthy clothes."

Then he spoke to Joshua. "See, I have taken your sin away from you, and I will dress you in fine clothes."

Zechariah could not help himself. "Put a clean turban on his head!" he called out.

(All night Zechariah had only been asking the angel questions. Now he gave an order, and they did it.)

So they wound a clean turban around Joshua's head and dressed him in clean clothes.

Then came the promise. "Listen, Joshua, you and the priests with you. You are a sign of what is coming. I am going to bring my servant, the Branch. Look at the stone I have set in front of Joshua. It has seven eyes, and I will carve words on it myself. And I will take away the sin of this land in a single day. On that day each of you will invite your neighbor to sit under your vine and your fig tree."

But clean clothes get dirty again. Joshua would sin again, and so would the people, and every year the high priest started over. The vision promised a single day, and that day had not come.

Priests grew old and died, and for five hundred years the people waited for the Branch.

Then another priest came, with not one speck of dirt of his own, and he stood on trial too. Men stood around him and pointed. Soldiers pressed thorns onto his head where a clean turban should have been. Then they pulled off his clothes and threw dice for them. On a single day he took the dirt of the whole world onto himself, and died. In the language Zechariah spoke, he had the same name as Joshua. We say it Jesus.

On the third day he rose, and everyone who belongs to him wears his clean clothes. The accuser has nothing left to say.