If you’ll turn with me in your Bibles this morning, our first scripture reading will come from Matthew chapter 21, beginning in the first verse.
Now when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, you shall say, ‘The Lord needs them,’ and he will send them at once.” This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet, saying, “Say to the daughter of Zion, ‘Behold, your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.’”
The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them. They brought the donkey and the colt and put on them their cloaks, and he sat on them. Most of the crowds spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. And the crowds that went before him and that shouted following him were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”
And when he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up, saying, “Who is this?” And the crowd said, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee.”
And from there we turn back to the Old Testament to the prophet Zechariah, to chapter 9, beginning in the ninth verse. The prophet writes, “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. 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. His rule shall be from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth.
As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit. Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope; today I declare that I will restore to you double. For I have bent Judah as my bow; I have made Ephraim its arrow; I will stir up your sons, O Zion, against your sons, O Greece, and wield you like a warrior’s sword. Then the Lord will appear over them, and his arrow will go forth like lightning. The Lord God will sound the trumpet and will march forth in the whirlwinds of the south. The Lord of hosts will protect them, and they shall devour and tread down the slingstones. They shall drink and roar as if drunk with wine and be full like a bowl, drenched like the corners of the altar.
On that day, the Lord their God will save them as the flock of his people, for like the jewels of a crown, they shall shine on his land; for how great is his goodness, and how great his beauty.”
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Heavenly Father, you have given us your word. You have told us things of what you will do and what to expect. You have told us how you have done them. Now help us open our hearts to receive, our minds to understand what this means for us. What is this great and good salvation you have given for your people? In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
So today is Palm Sunday, the Sunday which traditionally begins Holy Week, when we remember and ponder the final few days of our Savior Jesus Christ. The Friday and Saturday to come will be days filled with sadness and darkness until the brightness and joy of the Lord’s Day dawning. Yet today we remember an earlier day of jubilant celebration. We remember the excitement and expectant hope of God’s people expressed through song and worship when their King came home to their city, entering into the very place where he would soon be rejected by those he came to save and enthroned upon a Roman cross. Then on the third day after, by his resurrection, his eternal reign would then be inaugurated.
However, while the people of Jerusalem did not know or understand what was needing to happen to the Christ, they were excited and hopeful because the Messiah King had finally come. He was not the king that they were expecting, nor was his kingdom the one that they were waiting for. This Son of David was not merely a man come to rule a human kingdom called Israel and drive out the pagan invaders and their Roman overlords, but he was the Son of God and the Son of Man come down to be seated on David’s eternal throne.
The Messiah, he who comes in the name of the Lord, was welcomed to the earthly expression of holy Zion. His coming was anticipated and longed for, but even though it was written plainly in the scriptures, sinful men were kept blind to the truth of his coming, expecting someone to come like the many other messiahs, small ‘m’ messiahs, who came before Jesus. The crowds anticipated a glorious hero who would conquer and expel the Romans from the land, hoping that the Messiah would come establish a new, obviously Jewish theocratic monarchy; that he would usher in a new age of peace and prosperity for God’s people in the land which God had promised to their ancestor Abraham.
So they welcomed this itinerant rabbi carpenter as king, doing so rightly but for all the wrong reasons. The Messiah King came to conquer the greatest enemy of God’s people, death. He came to free them from the oppression of sin and the dominion of Satan. He came to usher in the Lord’s kingdom, the ultimate eschatological kingdom of Yahweh. The great Servant of the Lord had arrived now to open the eyes of the blind, to release the captives, and redeem all God’s people from their bondage.
Now we have spent the past several weeks considering several of the messianic prophecies written by Isaiah concerning the divine servant. Today, however, we’re going to try and understand more about what the prophet Zechariah had to say about the Messiah King, Jesus. First, remember that Isaiah’s prophetic ministry occurred over about a 60-year period between 740 and 680 BC, before the fall of the kingdom of Judah, before the Babylonian exile and captivity.
But Zechariah, he prophesied much later; he prophesied around 520 BC after the people returned from exile during the construction of the second temple when Judea was a minor Persian province. First, Isaiah spoke to a people who still had a king in Jerusalem, but these people had still seen the rebellious schismatic kingdom of Israel, or Samaria, ruined and deported by the Assyrians. So many of them were beginning to understand their deep need for redemption and a divine rescuer.
Then Zechariah spoke to a people with a newfound hope. They had just witnessed and experienced some of the fulfillment of the Lord’s promises. They had been returned to their ancestral home; the temple was being rebuilt, and even the construction was being paid for by their pagan king. Yet the people were still not free.
The Jews at that time were not an independent nation; they had a home, although they did not have their own king. Still, their hearts were inflamed with the hope of a new king to come, one like the ancient king David, who would reunite the people and restore their earthly fortunes.
So this is how the idea of the Lord’s servant, the idea of Messiah, with a capital M, gained this additional and greater expectation of kingship over God’s people. God’s people had not had a king for well over 70 years at this point, and they had not had a godly Davidic king for even longer, not since King Josiah. So this hope and desire for their own king drove the political fortunes of the people over the next 500-ish years, a desire that was left unfulfilled by the Hasmonean dynasty of the Maccabees, nor was it fulfilled by the Herodian kings who married into that family and succeeded them.
So it is within this cultural mythology that Jesus of Nazareth, as the natural-born descendant of King David and who had such a wide social popularity, met the scriptural requirements to become the liberating political Messiah of their dreams. This largely explains for us the reaction of the crowd on this day just before the Passover when Jesus came into Jerusalem mounted on a donkey. Their cries of “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”—these songs echoed the ancient psalms of victory by the Lord’s anointed king.
Truly the crowd was justified in celebrating, for God’s anointed king had come, even if they were celebrating the wrong hope. However, it is exactly because of this incorrect hope and their wrong expectations that the Jewish leaders were so very nervous and so concerned about this man Jesus. This is why they instituted their murderous plot leading to the means by which our salvation was purchased: the cross. Truly, regarding their treatment of Jesus, it was like Joseph had said to his brothers down in Egypt, “As for you, you meant evil for me, but God meant it for good.” So the Lord will always turn and use the wickedness of men for his own good purposes as he wills to.
Now what Matthew really wants us to understand and remember about this celebration includes all the reasons that Zechariah gave in his prophecy. Zechariah declared, “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! For this will be a day of great joy,” and he calls upon God’s people to be joyful, to sing and shout the Lord’s praises because something wondrous is happening here. Their king, the true king of holy Israel, is coming.
He next describes just how we shall know him, how we will recognize him when he finally appears: “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.” Now, prophetically, this mount of the king is a very particular and unique sign. It is specific proof and evidence for the fulfillment to support it and grant us greater confidence in the Lord’s promises.
A foal is ordinarily any donkey under the age of one, either male or female, while a colt is only ever a male donkey under the age of four, with a filly being the corresponding female. Considering what Zechariah originally wrote, “on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey,” what he specifically describes here was that the messianic king would come mounted upon a male donkey, upon a young male donkey, the son of a female donkey. This explains why Jesus sent his disciples ahead of him, telling them to go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied and a colt with her.
“Untie them and bring them to me.” Hearing this Palm Sunday story, I always wondered, why did Jesus need or want both animals? He can only ride one at a time, right? It is to demonstrate this unique fulfillment by displaying both the young colt and its prophetically required mother. Jesus never minces words, nor does he ever utter anything without specific intent. So the specificity of his instruction to the sent disciples to find this female donkey with her colt tied up confirms both Jesus as a prophet and Zechariah’s prophecy in the fulfillment that this is not just random happenstance.
Sadly, this was something that even the disciples would not themselves understand fully until much later. But now that the prophetic sign has been given and fulfilled, what does it tell us about this king, righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey? This messianic king, he will enter into Jerusalem, into God’s holy city of Zion. He himself is the just king; he is the righteous king. And when he enters in, he brings and carries within himself the salvation of God’s people—these daughters of Zion.
So he enters into Zion in a humble manner, mounted upon an ordinary beast of burden. Unlike a Roman hero who would enter into the city mounted upon a tall war horse or perhaps riding in a chariot, no; the Lord’s king rides upon the lowly donkey, a traditional mount for Israel’s royalty. He does not enter his city like Caesar during the spectacle of a triumph, although entering into Jerusalem mounted, especially during this annual time of pilgrimage, was not exactly the humble act for someone of Jesus’s fame.
Compared to all of his non-responses that he gave those people who asked, “Are you the Messiah?” this was a loud declaration silently screaming out to those with the ears to hear, and it was his own confession of identity as the Messiah, the true David’s eternal throne. And those people who understood just what Jesus was declaring himself to be by fulfilling this prophecy also heard his intended purpose proclaimed—or what they thought his intended purpose was: the salvation of God’s people.
And that is exactly what frightened the teachers of the law, that Jesus was claiming to bring salvation, that he was to be the rescuer of Israel. Because they had a very wrong understanding of what salvation is. To be saved means to be rescued. Salvation is deliverance from danger, or trials, punishment, or bondage. But it also describes the great works of deliverance that the Lord had done on behalf of his people in history past—the Exodus from Egypt, the conquest of Canaan, deliverance from oppression by the hands of the judges, the many times when David was rescued from the hand of King Saul, the return from Babylon, or even the successful rebellion of the Maccabees.
But what the people really did not understand, what the students of the law and prophets did not really understand, was our need for an eschatological salvation—a salvation from all our sins dating all the way back to Adam and the garden. We people today still have this very same problem. We do not see any need for a personal salvation, especially from sin, a concept that has been largely eradicated from our modern culture. Those people back then were so blind to their true need, just as we each are before we are given faith in Jesus Christ.
People would accept the idea that death is something natural, expected, and even necessary. We will say that the only constant in life is death and taxes. We deny the problem of sin; we assume that everybody is inherently good, that they only need the chance to choose good instead of evil. And this is why when the Jews of the day saw Jesus fulfilling prophecy, their minds likely went straight to an earthly hope of salvation.
Seeing Jesus mounted upon that colt and hearing the joyful noise of his reception surely brought Zechariah’s words to the forefront of their minds, and they surely remembered the continuation of the prophecy: “Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope; today I declare that I will restore to you double. For I have bent Judah as my bow; I have made Ephraim its arrow; I will stir up your sons, O Zion, against your sons, O Greece, and wield you like a warrior’s sword.”
They heard Jesus issuing a cry, rallying to war. They heard a call for revolution—revolution against Rome, against their authority, their social order, and against the whole status quo in Judea. It is no wonder that they feared Jesus and his influence so much. The idea of a united and militant Israel, with Judah as a bow and Ephraim as the arrow, that the people were being stirred up against Rome and its authority, and that this movement would be wielded by this King Jesus—a nobody from the remotest part of the land, Galilee, a carpenter and tradesman—who even if he was a distant descendant of David, he was so far removed from nobility or the politics of the day that any armed revolution led by a man with his background must surely fail.
Scripture shows us this fear and worry in John 11 when the priests and Sanhedrin were justifying their plot against Jesus. There even, still, we see the Lord’s hand at work even in this, as Caiaphas prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad.
What these learned men missed and forgot in the midst of their fears was the rest of the Lord’s promise given to the people just before this: “As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.” A waterless pit is an empty cistern—dry, barren, lifeless. Sometimes they would be used to hold prisoners or other captives. We remember Joseph when he was imprisoned by his brothers, or the prophet Jeremiah when he was cast into one.
However, throughout scripture, the pit also often corresponds with Sheol—the place of the dead. So in the messianic context, this waterless pit does not refer to any human dungeon or to Hebrew prisoners still being kept far away, exiled from the land. It plainly meant a far greater prison such that it required the Lord himself to release them.
And this greater prison, the greatest prison from which no man may escape on his own, is death—the death which all people receive as their due for our sins. But the blood of which covenant had the Lord made a covenant with Israel to free them from bondage in Egypt and all other lands in which they forever found themselves enslaved? No, at Mount Sinai, the Lord made a covenant with his people whereby, through their obedience, they would always remain his treasured possession among all peoples—a covenant which the people never kept entirely or for very long.
No, this covenant is the new covenant spoken of by Jeremiah, the covenant where God would put his law into the people’s hearts, when they shall all know the Lord, when all the iniquities would be forgiven and their sins forgotten, when they shall truly be his people and he their God.
The prisoners in the waterless pit, held captive by their sin and death, are those truly dead. The dead cannot be a people; the dead cannot know God; the dead cannot own property; the dead do not live, and their death is solely the result of sin—Adam’s and our own. The Apostle Paul reminds us that apart from God’s grace, we are dead in our trespasses; apart from Jesus Christ, we are numbered among the prisoners in the pit, in dire need of divine rescue.
But because our King has come, we have now become the prisoners of hope. Our King has come, and he brings to us life—eternal life—so let us praise and worship him for it.
But then what else does the Lord promise to do? The Lord says, “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. His rule shall be from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth.”
All the weapons of war—the chariots, the war horse, and the bow—shall first be removed from God’s people, and then his Messiah King shall speak peace to the nations. His kingdom will be one of peace, not one of war or violence, and it shall stretch across the whole world, across all creation.
But a kingdom of peace cannot be built upon a foundation of violence. Even the great King David knew only a short few periods of peace during his reign; he was a man of war, soiled by the blood of his many foes, and it was not until Solomon, his son, that the land finally had peace on all sides around him and the Lord’s temple was finally built.
Jesus is David’s greater son, such that all creation will truly know peace. What the Jewish leaders had forgotten is that the strength of united Israel had never been found in their force of arms. The world proclaims its strength through displays of great violence, but the power of God’s people is not found within themselves but is found in the Lord alone.
So praise the Lord! The prophesied King has come and set his captive people free. Let us sing for joy; his people, the elect of God, are united in Christ Jesus—all his people together—and we are stirred up, prepared for battle. But it’s not our war to fight; we don’t have the weapons for it.
But the best news is we don’t need them; the Lord fights for us. So after this, our King, our Good Shepherd, has come and fought and saved us. Now truly, we are the Lord’s treasured possession, shining like the jewels of a crown, for we are being made into a people faithful to his covenant, so that we may shine forth in joy of the Lord over all creation, reflecting his glory.
Our Savior King has come; the war has been won. Rejoice! Shout for joy because the only righteous King has entered into your heart and brought you your true salvation. Let Jesus shake up the status quo in your life and follow in his wake to reap the good that he offers to you.
So let us all join the jubilant throng, singing with the saints of God, shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” For we know, believe, and trust where the only hope of eternal life is found—the cross of Jesus Christ, the promised resurrection, and life of the world yet to come. This is the gift our King brings to us: Hosanna in the highest! Amen.