Your King Comes, Humble

Shout! Rejoice! Your king is coming! Everyone turns to look for warhorses and chariots and gleaming armour. And down the road comes a man riding a young donkey.

The prophet Zechariah lived at the same time as Haggai, about five hundred and twenty years before Jesus. His grandfather Iddo was among the priests who had come back from exile in Babylon. Jerusalem was a shadow of its old self. Its walls were broken. Its temple was half built. There was no king on David's throne; the land was a small corner of the vast Persian empire. Around it, powerful nations came and went. For people like that, the idea of their own king again seemed like a dream from long ago. And then God gave Zechariah a message.

Chapter nine of Zechariah opens with God's word against the proud nations and cities around Israel: the strongholds of Syria, the rich ports of Tyre and Sidon, the Philistine cities by the sea. Tyre had heaped up silver like dust and gold like mud in the streets, Zechariah says, but it would not last. God would watch over his own house. And then, suddenly, the prophet turns toward Jerusalem with a shout. “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee.” This is not a quiet announcement. It is the kind of cry you give when the person you have been waiting for finally comes over the hill.

But listen to what kind of king he is. “He is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.” Just, meaning righteous, someone who does what is right. Having salvation, bringing rescue. And lowly. Humble. Gentle. He does not come in on a war horse to frighten people. He comes on a young donkey, an animal of peace, an ordinary animal that farmers and families used every day. Kings in the ancient world loved to show their power. This king shows his humility. You could walk right up to him.

Then Zechariah says what this king will do. God will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem. The battle bow will be broken. In other words, the weapons of war will be taken away. And the king will speak peace to the nations. Not only to Israel, but to the nations. His rule will stretch from sea to sea, from the river to the ends of the earth. Think how surprising this is. A humble king on a donkey, without an army, whose kingdom is bigger than any empire. His power is not in swords but in peace. Zechariah could not see his face. But he knew he was coming.

A donkey was not a joke for a king in Israel. When King David chose Solomon to succeed him, he had Solomon ride on David's own mule down to the spring of Gihon to be anointed, as the book of First Kings tells us. But horses and chariots were the great symbols of military power, and the law even warned Israel's kings not to multiply horses. About five hundred years after Zechariah, all four Gospels describe Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a young donkey, and Matthew and John quote this very prophecy.

This promise is in Zechariah chapter nine, verses nine and ten. The king who would ride a donkey into Jerusalem began his life in a stable, laid in a manger, with no palace at all. So here is a question to carry with you. What does it tell you about Jesus that he chose to come humble and gentle, instead of mighty and frightening?