Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 230 · August 18
Whom They Have Pierced
“And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn.”
Who is speaking in this verse, and who is pierced?
Read it slowly, because the pronouns move inside one sentence. They shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him. Me, and then him, with nothing in between to explain the change. John stood at a cross and quoted the line with him throughout, They shall look on him whom they pierced. Both readings are printed in the Bible in your hand and Zechariah does not resolve the question. What he does instead is describe the funeral: as one mourneth for his only son, and then a whole country grieving one household at a time, every family apart, and their wives apart.
Hadadrimmon in the valley of Megiddon is the comparison he reaches for, and it is a grief his first hearers could name and we cannot. It is probably Josiah, killed at Megiddo, for whom Jeremiah lamented and the singing men and the singing women went on lamenting for years afterwards; nobody can prove it. One chapter on, the line people quote as though it were the cross, What are these wounds in thine hands, belongs to a man in the middle of denying he was ever a prophet, and the verse Jesus did take for himself is four lines further down, smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered. So the question stays open and sharpens. The looking and the mourning begin because God pours out a spirit of grace and of supplications first, before anybody looks at anything. Which of the two have you been waiting on, the sight, or the thing that would make a person able to stand the sight?
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 230 is In the Midst (Matthew 18:20).