Prisoners of Hope

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost — Zechariah 9:9–12

Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope; today I declare that I will restore to you double [Zechariah 9:12].

Most of us have met this text before, though perhaps not within the long season after Pentecost. The ninth chapter of Zechariah supplied the words that the Evangelists reached for when they described Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey — Lo, your king comes to you — and so the passage has become, for many readers, a kind of prelude to Holy Week, heard briefly and then subsumed into that larger story. That is not wrong, exactly. But it means we have probably been reading verse nine while verse twelve waits quietly for our attention. It is verse twelve that contains the phrase that has not let me go since I first encountered it years ago.

A little context helps here. The book of Zechariah belongs to the period after the Babylonian exile — a community trying to reconstitute itself, to rebuild what had been destroyed, to locate itself in a history that had not gone the way anyone expected. Into that situation, the prophet announces the arrival of a king. And the announcement begins with a surprise.

The king comes on a donkey.

This is not, as it might first appear, a simple image of humility. The Hebrew word translated “humble” in verse nine is ani — the word for the poor, the lowly, the dispossessed. OT scholar Robert Alter notes something that sharpens this further: in the earlier biblical period, donkeys were actually the mount of royalty. By Zechariah’s time, horses were the expected conveyance of power. The donkey, then, is not merely a modest choice. It is a deliberate archaism — and it anticipates what verse ten makes explicit: this king will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, the war horse from Jerusalem, the battle bow. He arrives on the old mount precisely because he is done with the new weapons.

This is a king whose power operates by a different logic entirely. Not the logic of force, but of something that force cannot reach.

Which brings us to the people for whom he is coming.

Verse eleven introduces an image that is easy to read past: the waterless pit. God speaks directly — “because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.” The dry cistern was not an abstraction to Zechariah’s first hearers. It was a specific, terrible thing. Joseph’s brothers threw him into one. Jeremiah was lowered into one. A pit with no water means no sustenance, no possibility of self-rescue, no way out that originates from within. You are there until someone reaches down.

It is to these people — not the powerful, not the comfortable, not those whose circumstances still offer ordinary grounds for hope — that verse twelve speaks its extraordinary address:

Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope.

The phrase is an oxymoron, and it is meant to be. Prisoners are defined by the foreclosure of the future. Hope is precisely the refusal of that foreclosure. To hold the two words together is to describe something that should not be able to exist — and yet does. People who have every reason to have stopped expecting anything, and who find, despite everything, that they cannot. Not because they are heroic. Not because their faith is stronger than most. But because something has hold of them that will not let go.

The medieval Hebrew poet Judah HaLevi became so captivated by this phrase that he returned to it again and again in his poetry. Something in asirei ha-tikvah — prisoners of hope — refused to release him. Which is, perhaps, exactly the point.

Elsewhere, I have written about our uncle Harold (one of our mother’s brothers) and his wife Betty. Shortly after their daughter Jan was born, she developed a severe case of cerebral palsy. She never walked. She never talked. She never held her head up on her own. For twenty-six years, Harold and Betty fed her baby food and changed her diapers — and brought her to church every Sunday, and included her in every Thanksgiving and every Christmas, and loved her with a steadiness that did not perform itself or require an audience.

There was the night when all the other girls Jan's age — my own age — were putting on prom dresses. Betty allowed herself, on that particular evening, to ask the question that sat beneath all the others: why couldn’t Jan be like the others?

She had no answer. Neither did Harold. They simply kept going.

Jan died at twenty-six. After the burial, the family gathered at Harold and Betty’s — the ordinary, necessary business of food and quiet conversation that follows these things. And at some point Betty put her arm around Harold’s waist, and he put his around her shoulder, and she looked at him and asked, simply:

What now?

Twenty-six years in the waterless pit. And still leaning forward. Still oriented toward a future. You do not ask what now if you have stopped expecting anything.

Harold turned to her and said: “Now, she’s like the others.”

Zechariah is not writing to people whose circumstances have improved. He is writing to people still in the waterless pit, still waiting, still without the ordinary grounds for expecting anything. And what he offers them is not an explanation, not a timetable, not a promise that the pit will shortly become something more comfortable. He gives them a name for what they already are.

Prisoners of hope.

It is, on reflection, less a description than a declaration. You are held by something you did not generate and cannot, finally, escape. The king who comes without weapons, on the old mount of an earlier era, is the only king whose arrival means anything to people in that condition — because he comes not with a force that cannot reach the pit, but with the covenant that already has.

Harold and Betty did not choose to remain prisoners. They simply found, year after year, that hope would not release them. That is not a heroic story. It is something quieter and more durable than heroism — the discovery that what holds you is stronger than what has you trapped.

Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope.

The address is still open. It has been finding its people for twenty-six centuries — in Zechariah’s community, in Judah HaLevi’s poems, at a post-burial family gathering, and here, wherever you are reading this, in whatever waterless pit currently has your name on it.

You are already held. That is not nothing. That may, in fact, be everything.