Zechariah 9:9-10 Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, your King comes to you: he is just… The Caesars of the world have come upon strong palfreys, prancing, snorting; from their nostrils there has come fire, and their bits have been wet with foam; how comes the King? — "lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass." The more King for that! Some men need their own furniture to set them off; some persons would be nothing but for their entourage: the things that are round about them seem to be so admirable that surely they must be admirable them selves: — such the loose but most generous reasoning of some men in some cases. "Lowly" —"I am meek and lowly in heart." Why this colt, the foal of an ass? To rebuke the horses of heathenism: — "The Lord will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem": they are signs of pomp, self-sufficiency, conscious dignity, as who should say, we made ourselves, and we are the builders of the great Babylons of the earth. The Lord will not have it so with His Son, with His Church, with His kingdom. Only meekness has an eternal province. It is so always and everywhere, if you would but learn it. It is so at school. The boy who is going to do everything with a wave of his hand will do nothing; the boy who does not care anything about the examination until the night before it comes off and then gathers himself together in tremendous impotence, comes back the next night a sadder but a wiser boy. It is so in business, it is so in the pulpit, it is so along the whole line of human action: pretence means failure. But there must not be mere meekness of manner; the tiger is sometimes asleep. There is a spurious meekness; there are persons that have no voices at all, and when they speak they are supposed to be so gentle and so modest and so unassuming. Not they! It is for want of hoof, not want of will; they would crush you if they could. This meekness is a quality of the soul, this is the very bloom of greatness, this is the finest expression of power. Meekness is not littleness, insignificance, incompetency; meekness is the rest that expresses the highest degree of velocity. "Riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass." All the rabbis have allegorised this ass with painful tediousness. They in very deed have tried to read meanings into the words, but they were so obviously incongruous that they never got into the words. Take it as a type of your King's meekness, take it as an assurance that His kingdom is not of this world. This world hates all meekness. Mammon never listened to a prayer; Mammon hates even read prayers; Mammon has a distaste for theological conception; Mammon never sung a hymn or a psalm; Mammon never bowed his knees in tender, holy adoration. The eyes of Mammon are greed, the hands of Mammon are felons, the desire of Mammon is possession, though it may be purchased with blood. This world, therefore, will not have true meekness, gentleness, pitifulness; the world will have pomp and show and magnificence and royalty, — one day its heart will sicken at the sight of its own idols. These are the lines that have sudden endings. Truth encircles the universe: all lies, however glibly told, suddenly disappear in the pit. Jesus Christ then comes to set up a kingdom that is moral, subjective, spiritual; a kingdom that is clement, redeeming, sympathetic; a kingdom that rests upon unseen but immovable bases. Whatever He touches He elevates. Take the principle, and do not vex the mind or distract the piety with worthless detail: the principle is this, that when Jesus Christ comes into the world He comes as no other king ever came, that He may do a work which no other king ever dreamed. (Joseph Parker, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass. |
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