Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Behold, your king is coming to you;
righteous and having salvation is he,
humble and mounted on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey. —Zechariah 9:9
The next day the large crowd that had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, crying out, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel!” And Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, just as it is written… —John 12;12-14
True story…
Many years ago, when I was in high school, my father decided to give his four-year-old grandson, David Wichern, a special birthday gift: a donkey colt. So, thinking the little animal might be injured in a horse trailer, we loaded him into the back seat of my father’s 1948 Mercury convertible, put the top down and set off for Memphis, Tennessee.
I kid you not: The little donkey sat bolt upright the entire trip, like a proper passenger, looking all around him, clearly enthralled by the scenery. It was fun and games until we drove through towns along the way and were greeted with guffaws and gales of laughter. The donkey loved the journey; I, on the other hand, a self-absorbed teenager, was mortified.
When we presented the donkey to David he wailed, “But Pawpaw, I wanted a real horse,” which meant we had to haul the little beast all the way back to Dallas. It was like running a gauntlet. I bear the marks of that humiliation to this day.
In ancient days, the monuments reveal, kings rode “real horses”— powerful, 19 hands, 2,000-pound war horses similar to Clydesdale, Percheron, or Belgian draft horses. But Israel’s Messiah would make his grand entrance on a pint-sized, flop-eared donkey—a ludicrous sight, more worthy of side-splitting laughter than acclaim.
We should note—for it is very important—that our Lord brought salvation to the world through humiliation and loss: “By dying he dying slew.” His lowly actions are a daily reminder that the weapons of our warfare are not the self-regarding aggressions of this world, but meekness, humility and self-denial.
By weakness and defeat,
He won the meed (reward) and crown;
Trod all our foes beneath His feet
By being trodden down. —Simon Gandy
David H. Roper
3.27.21
