The Filthy Garments Taken Away and the Filthy Left Filthy
Old Testament: Zacharias 3:3-5
And Jesus was clothed with filthy garments: and he stood before the face of the angel. Who answered, and said to them that stood before him, saying: Take away the filthy garments from him. And he said to him: Behold I have taken away thy iniquity, and have clothed thee with change of garments. And he said: Put a clean mitre upon his head: and they put a clean mitre upon his head, and clothed him with garments, and the angel of the Lord stood.
Old Testament, also: Isaias 61:10
I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, and my soul shall be joyful in my God: for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation: and with the robe of justice he hath covered me, as a bridegroom decked with a crown, and as a bride adorned with her jewels.
New Testament: Apocalypse 22:11, 14; Apocalypse 19:8
He that hurteth, let him hurt still: and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is just, let him be justified still: and he that is holy, let him be sanctified still. ... Blessed are they that wash their robes in the blood of the Lamb: that they may have a right to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city.
The connection
Jesus the high priest stands before the angel in filthy garments, and he is not told to wash. The garments are taken off him by others, his iniquity is taken away in the same breath, and he is clothed in a change of raiment with a clean mitre set on his head. Nothing in the scene is his own doing: he stands there and is dressed. Justin Martyr reads it of the Church within a century of the Apostles: the filthy garments are sins, and we have been stripped of them through the name of the first-begotten Son, who has promised to invest us with prepared garments. Isaias says the same thing in the first person and adds the wedding: He hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, and with the robe of justice He hath covered me, as a bridegroom decked with a crown, and as a bride adorned with her jewels. The word for those garments is a rare one, and the Apocalypse uses it once, at the very end, to say the opposite. He that is filthy, let him be filthy still. There the filth is not taken away, because the time for taking it away has run out; the sentence simply confirms a man in what he already is. Three verses later come those who wash their robes and have the right to the tree of life, and the verb there is the one the Law used for washing clothes: the man with an issue counts seven days, washes his garments, bathes, and is clean. Three remedies for filth stand together. The Law has a man wash himself clean. Zacharias has it taken off him while he stands there doing nothing. The Apocalypse blesses those who wash their robes, and says elsewhere what they wash them in, which is blood, and nothing is made clean that way except this. Between the two stands the Bride, to whom it is given that she should be clothed in fine linen, glittering and clean, which the Evangelist says is the justifications of saints: her holiness, genuinely hers, and not put on by her. And beside her the other woman, dressed in purple and scarlet and gilt with gold, whose clothing is inventory, listed among her cargo and mourned by the merchants who sold it to her. Filth removed, filth kept, linen given, linen bought.
Moral sense
The scene in Zacharias is what confession is. The filthy garments are not laundered and handed back; they are taken away, and something else is put on. A man cannot dress himself for this; he can only stand there and let it be done, which is harder than washing and is why the sacrament is difficult to approach.
Anagogical sense
Let him be filthy still is the most frightening sentence in the book, and it is not a threat. It is a description of what happens when the stripping is refused long enough: nothing. The man is left exactly as he came. The Bride's linen and the washed robes stand on either side of it, three chapters before and three verses after, so the reader sees both ends of the same offer at once.
The Fathers
St Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 116: "For just as that Jesus (Joshua), called by the prophet a priest, evidently had on filthy garments... and is called a brand plucked out of the fire, because he had received remission of sins when the devil that resisted him was rebuked; even so we, who through the name of Jesus have believed as one man in God the Maker of all, have been stripped, through the name of His first-begotten Son, of the filthy garments, i.e., of our sins." A few lines earlier he gives the other half: Jesus the Son of God "has promised again to deliver us, and invest us with prepared garments, if we do His commandments." Justin is reading Zacharias 3:1-2 together with Zacharias 2:10-13, which he quotes in 115.
Warrant
The word is rhyparos, filthy, and it is rare enough to carry the entry. In the whole Septuagint it stands twice, Zacharias 3:3 and 3:4, and both are these garments; in the New Testament twice, at James 2:2 and at Apocalypse 22:11, where the filthy man is left filthy. The Latin keeps it: vestibus sordidis and vestimenta sordida against qui in sordibus est, sordescat adhuc, and sordescat occurs once in the whole Vulgate. So does the Douay, which reads filthy in both places, which means a reader in English can see the link without being told it is there. The Hebrew is blunter than either. Begadim tsoim at Zacharias 3:3 is from tsoah, excrement, and no softer word was chosen for a high priest standing before the angel of the Lord. Two limits on all this. James uses the same word of a poor man's shabby coat, so it can be used with no reference to anything, and at Apocalypse 22:11 it describes the man rather than his clothes. The concept carries because Zacharias glosses the garments as the iniquity in the act of removing them, but this is a rare adjective in two corresponding scenes, not a phrase reused, and the Apocalypse never names Zacharias. A second rare word runs the other way. Pluno is the verb for washing garments, as against louo for washing the body, and Leviticus 15:13 uses both in order: he shall wash his clothes, plunei ta himatia, and bathe his body, and he shall be clean, katharos. In the New Testament pluno stands three times, at Luke 5:2 of nets and at Apocalypse 7:14 and 22:14 of robes. So the Law's remedy is washing, Zacharias' is removal, and the Apocalypse's is washing again but in blood. One caution about the Douay there: its wash their robes in the blood of the Lamb at 22:14 follows the Vulgate, in sanguine Agni. The Greek at 22:14 has only the washing; the blood is at 7:14, and the entry does not rest on the longer reading. The English will not find this by itself, because filthy in the Douay renders at least four different words. Sordidus and rhyparos at Zacharias 3:3 and Apocalypse 22:11, which are the entry's; foedus humor at Leviticus 15:3, where the Greek has the ordinary term for uncleanness; and inquinatae at Psalm 9:105, where the Greek is bebelountai, profaned, and the Hebrew at 10:5 carries no word for filth at all. Leviticus 15:3 is a trap for a search besides, being full of rhysis and rheon, flow, which look like rhyparos and come from another root. A second and weaker thread runs alongside it. The Septuagint clothes the priest, periebalon auton himatia, with a kidarin katharan, and Apocalypse 19:8 gives the Bride that she should be clothed, peribaletai, in byssinon lampron katharon; the same verb dresses Babylon at 17:4 and 18:16. That much is a pattern rather than a fingerprint, since katharos stands in 140 Septuagint verses and 22 in the New Testament, and it does not survive into the Latin. It is recorded here because it supports the reading, not because it establishes it. Isaias 61:10 does survive: indumento justitiae circumdedit me, quasi sponsum, quasi sponsam, against byssinum enim justificationes sunt sanctorum. Nor does the entry rest on Exodus 28: that overlap of purple, scarlet, linen and gold is real and not distinctive, since Ezechiel 27 lists all of them but the scarlet in Tyre's manifest, the oracle Apocalypse 18 is modelled on. The Catechism reference is left empty deliberately. Eight paragraphs were read against this entry, 1216 and 1243 on Baptism, 1425 to 1428 on the conversion of the baptised, 1468 on the effects of Penance, and 796, 1602, 1617 and 2519 on the Bride and purity of heart. The nearest is 1243, where the white garment signifies that the baptised has put on Christ; that is a garment given rather than earned, and it is still an adjacent theme rather than this one, since it treats the rite and not Zacharias or the Apocalypse. Whether the Catechism cites Zacharias 3 anywhere was not established, so this records a checked absence among the likely paragraphs and not an exhaustive one.
The verses
Zacharias 3:3 · Zacharias 3:4 · Zacharias 3:5 · Isaias 61:10 · Apocalypse 22:11 · Apocalypse 22:14 · Apocalypse 19:8
