Rejoice Greatly, Your King Comes To You

Tuesday’s reading is Mark 11:1-14, which offers a new vista into just how utterly remarkable our Master is truly. How fortunate we are to be His apprentices. Good stuff here from a little known backwoods preacher from somewhere called Manhattan.

When Jesus rode into Jerusalem, people laid down their cloaks on the road in front of him and hailed him as a king coming in the name of the house of David. This type of parade was culturally appropriate in that era: A king would ride into town publicly and be hailed by cheering crowds. But Jesus deliberately departed from the script and did something very different. He didn’t ride in on a powerful war horse the way a king would; he was mounted on a polos, that is, a colt of a small donkey. Here was Jesus Christ, the King of authoritative, miraculous power, riding into town on a steed fit for a child or a hobbit. In this way, Jesus let it be known that he was the One prophesied in Zechariah, the great Messiah to come:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your King comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. (Zechariah 9:9)

This odd juxtaposition demonstrates that Jesus was King, but that he didn’t fit into the world’s categories of kingship. He brought together majesty and meekness. One of the greatest sermons ever written and preached in 1738 by Jonathan Edwards, titled “The Excellency of Christ.” Edwards’s imagination was captured by the prophetic vision of Jesus’s disciple John in Revelation 5:5-6: “Then one of the elders said to me, ‘Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.’ Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the center of the throne.” John is told to look for a lion, but there in the midst of the throne is a lamb. Edwards meditates on this:

The lion excels in strength and in the majesty of his appearance and voice. The lamb excels in meekness and patience…is [sacrificed] for food…and clothing. But we see that Christ is in the text compared to both, because the diverse excellencies of both wonderfully meet in him….There is in Jesus Christ…a conjunction of such really diverse excellencies as otherwise would have seemed to us utterly impossible in the same subject…

Edwards goes on to list in detail all the ways that Jesus combines character traits that we would consider mutually exclusive.
In Jesus we find:
–infinite majesty yet complete humility,
–perfect justice yet boundless grace,
–absolute sovereignty yet utter submission,
–all-sufficiency in himself yet entire trust and dependence on God.

But in Jesus the result of these extremes of character is not mental and emotional breakdown. Jesus’s personality is a complete and beautiful whole. 

(From Timothy Keller’s King’s Cross)