Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
Zechariah 9:9 (NIV)
The King Comes to You
Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion. Shout, Daughter Jerusalem. The city gets the order before anything has happened, and then it gets a description of the man it’s shouting about: righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
Zechariah is talking to a city with a long memory of being overrun. Around these words God promises to camp at his temple and keep watch, to take the chariots from Ephraim and the warhorses from Jerusalem, to break the battle bow. This king will proclaim peace to the nations. The disarming runs in both directions, and Jerusalem’s cavalry goes with it.
So the animal matters. The warhorses go later, and God takes them. The king rides in on a donkey with the cavalry still in the city. He’s righteous and victorious, and he comes low, and both of those describe the same arrival on the same road. He comes to you. The city doesn’t go out and find him somewhere impressive. He arrives where the people are standing, at the pace an animal walks.
Centuries after Zechariah, a crowd came out along a road to meet a man riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, and this is the day for that morning.
A woman at the flower market has been up since three and at ten she’s still behind. Tulips in buckets with the stems still dripping, a roll of brown paper, a customer who wants something for a table and keeps changing her mind. She’ll sell flowers all day for other people’s occasions and won’t sit down at one of them.
The order went out to a whole city, and a city is mostly people with their hands full and a reason to be somewhere else. Rejoicing on command is hard work for people like that, and the king comes to them in the middle of it. Your king comes to you.
He’s on the road toward the market and the tulips and the woman who’s behind on her work, and he’s coming at the speed of an animal that can’t be hurried.
A Prayer to Remember
Come the way you came to that city, Lord, toward people who are busy and late and not ready for you. We’ve been waiting for a better week to pay attention, and the better week keeps not arriving. Find us where we’re standing. Let us hear you coming while our hands are still full.
In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
