The King on a Donkey

When Rome wanted to honor a general who had won a war, it gave him a triumph: a slow procession through the city, the victor riding high in his chariot, the spoils carried before him and the conquered walking behind him in chains. Power announced itself the way power always has — with horses, iron, and a long line of the defeated. So when a prophet, writing in the years after the exile to a small, battered Jerusalem still rebuilding its walls, tells that city to look up for a coming king, we brace ourselves for the kind of arrival we have always known.

Zechariah hands them something else. "Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!... 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 king is real and the salvation is real — but the war horse is missing. He comes on the animal a farmer rides, the mount of errands and peacetime. Then the prophet says what this king will do with the weapons: he cuts them off. "I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall speak peace to the nations" (Zechariah 9:10). He disarms his own capital first, and wins, as Tim Keller notes of this scene, by refusing the warhorse the crowd expected and coming instead on the colt of peace — laying down the very things a triumph is built to show off.[1]

We are not always sure we want a king like that. Something in us prefers the chariot — a God who arrives with our enemies in chains and our side vindicated, who makes his peace by winning our arguments for us. The peace this King speaks is harder and better: peace made with God for people who had been his enemies, and then peace made between people who had been each other's. He does not broker it from a safe distance; he rides in to make it in person.

Matthew watched it happen. On a Sunday, Jesus sent for a colt, rode it down toward Jerusalem while the crowds threw their cloaks in the road, and Matthew tells us why: "This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet" (Matthew 21:4), and he quotes Zechariah almost word for word. The crowd wanted the chariot — a general to drive out Rome. He gave them the donkey, and rode it to a cross. That is where the weapons were finally cut off — not from Ephraim, but from us. The battle bow of the law had been drawn against us all along, our own guilt the target it was aimed at, and Jesus rode straight into its path and let it be spent on him instead. There, in the least triumphal hour the world has seen, he was "making peace by the blood of his cross" (Colossians 1:20).

So the King conquered, exactly as promised — his was simply the strange victory that looks, from the outside, like a defeat. The gates still stand open, and he still comes the same way: humble, speaking peace, riding past the chariots we were so sure we needed, toward the city that has finally admitted it is besieged. And the only fitting welcome is the old one — to throw our cloaks in the road, and let the King who disarmed himself come in.

[1] Tim Keller, "Behold, Your King is Coming," sermon, Gospel in Life.