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RSV

From: 2 Chronicles 24:17-25

Joash’s infidelity

[17] Now after the death of Jehoiada the princes of Judah came and did obeisance to the king; then the king hearkened to them. [18] And they forsook the house of the Lord, the God of their fathers, and served the Asherim and the idols. And wrath came upon Judah and Jerusalem for this their guilt. [19] Yet he sent prophets among them to bring them back to the Lord; these testified against them, but they would not give heed.

[20] Then the Spirit of God took possession of Zechariah the son of Jehoiada the priest; and he stood above the people, and said to the, “Thus says God, ‘Why do you transgress the commandments of the Lord, so that you cannot prosper? Because you have forsaken the Lord, he has forsaken you.’” [21] But they conspired against him, and by command of the king they stoned him with stones in the court of the house of the Lord. [22] Thus Joash the king did not remember the kindness which Jehoiada, Zechariah’s father, had sown him, but killed his son. And when he was dying, the said, “May the Lord see and avenge!”

[23] At the end of the year the army of the Syrians came up against Joash. They came to Judah and Jerusalem, and destroyed all the princes of the people from among the people, and sent all their spoil to the king of Damascus. [24] Though the army of the Syrians had come with few men, the Lord delivered into their hand a very great army, because they had forsaken the Lord, the God of their fathers. Thus they executed judgment on Joash.

[25] When they had departed from him, leaving him severely wounded, his servants conspired against him because of the blood of the son of Jehoiada the priest, and slew him on his bed. So he died; and they buried him in the city of David, but they did not bury him in the tombs of the kings.

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Commentary:

24:1-27. The account of the reign of Joash is written with a clearly pedagogical purpose; we divide it into two stages, to help show the religious message it contains.

The first stage (vv. 1-16) is all about the collection of monies to pay for the restoration of the temple (it follows the parallel passage of 2 Kings 12:1-17). During these years the real protagonist is Jehoiada the priest, who implemented the king’s initiatives to do with rebuilding the temple and returning it to its original splendour (v. 13). When Jehoiada died, he was buried in the city of David, that is to say, he was accorded royal honours.

The second stage was marked by disloyalty to the Lord and by idolatry. The military defeats and conspiracies were forms of punishment for the king’s transgressions (vv. 17-26). Joash’s worst crime was the shameful execution of the son of Jehoiada, the prophet Zechariah (not the same person as the last of the minor prophets), who had dared to denounce the king’s crimes. For this sin the king himself will lose his life at the hands of conspirators (v. 25). Once again we can see that God does not leave crimes unavenged.

This Zechariah is probably the prophet Jesus referred to as a prime example of an innocent victim sacrificed by his own people: “that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of the innocent Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar” (Mt 23:35). The fact that Jesus calls him “son of Barachiah” instead of “son of Jehoiada” could be because different genealogies were being used, or else there may have been some error in the transmission of the text. Anyway, given that the book of Chronicles is the last book in the Hebrew Bible, Jesus is saying that all innocent victims, from the first (Abel) to the last (Zechariah), are figures of the Christian martyrs and share in the redemption Christ effected by his death on the cross: “Moreover, my brothers, you must not think that all those good men who suffered persecution at the hands of the wicked – including those who were sent to announce the coming of the Lord – were not members of Christ’s body. Any man who belongs to the city of which Christ is the king must be a servant of Christ. That city runs from the blood of the innocent Abel to the blood of Zechariah. And on from there, from the blood of John [the Baptist], through that of the apostles and martyrs and all those who were faithful to Christ: these people together make up the city of which we speak” (St Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, 61, 3).