Go untie the donkey, the colt and bring it to me? These are of course famous words for this palm Sunday we celebrate every year. Why did Jesus choose a donkey? I mean, personally, I would choose my carbon fibre road bike or one of John Kane’s cafe bike motorcycles.
But we know that Jesus is about his Father’s business and that’s all that’s on his agenda. By riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, Jesus fulfilled a prophecy recorded in Zechariah: that He was, in fact, the king spoken of in Zechariah 9. In Matthew’s Gospel, we learn that this king is unique though, in that his central mission was to bring about universal justice. And what is God’s justice? God’s justice has to do with relationship: the relationship he has with every human being. And that relationship is one of being reconciled to God, by God himself. So in fact, this particular King - Jesus - is the one who was bringing salvation with Him.
Zechariah 9:9 characterises this king as being humble. Despite his dominion being from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth - in other words - over all the things and people he’s created, he comes bringing peace rather than bringing war. His justice is not vengeful or violent. Instead, this king, we are told, “will speak peace to the nations.” So Zechariah’s prophecy announces the ministry of a king who will bring with him and then come to reign with justice and peace.
I don’t know about you, but when I hear about groups like the UN sending in troops to bring about peace, or people praying for an end to gun violence, or to war, based on my own experience of the lack of success in bringing peace I say, “yeah, right, whatever. We need force to combat force.” I don’t think I’m alone in that now. And I would hazard the guess that most people in Christ’s time thought just like me.
And indeed we see throughout the Scriptures absolute doubt about the claims Jesus makes to be bringing about justice and peace: How could a king who is coming to save His people, the Jews, under Roman rule in Jesus’s day, save them by peaceful means? At the least, didn’t he need political power, if not a strong military?
Here’s the reality we can often miss though. And I think we miss it because we look around at so many terrible things happening and we get overwhelmed. We feel frustrated and helpless. And it’s easy to lose hope and come to doubt the kinds of prophetic words offered by Zechariah, or even, yes, to forget God’s promises to us through Jesus.
The thing is, Jesus didn’t come into Jerusalem on a donkey to save people from an earthly kingdom through force. Jesus came to save people from a far greater danger and in a far more surprising manner. He came to save all who would believe in Him from the many and varied effects of sin. Again, He didn’t do it by force. There was no Hollywood movie scene of retributive justice. No, Jesus’s enacting justice involved humbling himself by “becoming obedient to the point of death: death on a cross (Philippians 2:8).” Jesus rode a donkey into Jerusalem to fulfill the Scriptures. He did it to fulfill and to demonstrate to those willing to follow him that He was bringing forth salvation, not by force but through faith.
This is the most essential thing for us to remember: Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promises to save us from ourselves so that our own brokenness is not our final end. If it’s not our final end; if our final end is a life reconciled to God in and through Jesus, then how you and I act to show other people this hope really does matter.
It means that we’re not waiting for someone to enact justice. It means that justice has already broken into this broken world of ours; we’ve received it; we get a foretaste of it in our baptisms, in our Eucharists and in our fellowship with one another and of course every time we read through our Scriptures. If we’ve received God’s justice - saving us from living out the consequence of sin, which is death - we’re free from the despair of death, and of this life being all there is, to act with courage in the face of what can seem like difficult or even hopeless circumstances. There will always be war, oppression, violence, poverty, illness, death, destruction, change, unfairness, relationships that grow sour, jobs that frustrate or disappoint. But in Christ we can face these things with persistent courage, with hope, and with hearts oriented to help where and how we can. To do this is to lay a palm branch down so that others might see and recognize Jesus coming to them in what can so often seem a world falling apart. AMEN