Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an ass, on a colt the foal of an ass. 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 command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth. (Zech 9)
These verses begin with a command to rejoice! “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! God’s plan for his people is joy. And the rest of the passage is the basis of this joy.
The NRSV follows it with, “Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he.” The word triumphant can I think be misconstrued. It might be associated with triumphalism and victory in a military sense. Parading victoriously in from of your captors, but I think a better understanding is “successfully standing up for what is right.” Victory for the oppressed and the innocent, not just a brutal victory with the strongest surviving and the weak being destroyed.
So the first thing Zechariah says about this coming king is that he is righteous. He will stand victoriously on the side of right—on the side of the innocent and the faithful.
Isaiah 11:3-4 says of this King: “He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he will judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of the earth”
And Jesus, the Messiah, the one we anticipate during Advent, is the only one who is able to rule in this way, he alone is righteous in other words ‘right with God’. And so we can depend on him as our king –we can have confidence that we will be ruled fairly and rightly. (How often can we say that about our earthly rulers?) And that is a reason for joy!
The second way Jesus arrival brings joy is found in the other word “victorious.” Again victorious can be misleading – suggesting a physical battle – one of the reasons that the Jews were expecting their Messiah to come as a physical warrior to save them. There is a battle, as we shall see, but not a physical one involving physical strength. There is no sense of war here – He is not going to fight in the traditional sense. The power that saved and raised Jesus from the dead was not a visible, earthly power but an invisible, supernatural one. William McGregor says of this passage: “Jesus of Nazareth, on his borrowed farm-beast, with his way-worn company of poor men, and yet offering himself to his nation as the king of prophesy is the speaking reminder of the powers which lie behind our sight. I wonder when we in the church of Christ will learn from him to trust these powers and to cease from man.” (The Prince of Peace)
And finally, Jesus comes to bring peace.
And it’s from this passage we have the symbol of the Messiah riding on a donkey. In the Old Testament kings did ride now and then on donkeys. Not when they were going into war – then they would be on a war horse, they only rode on donkeys during peacetime.
And in verse 10 God speaks of abolishing the weapons of war – “he will cut off the chariot and the war horse and the battle bow and command peace” – so this passage is not about defeating evil in the traditional sense – it will not involve natural weapons. Only by righteous rule are the weak protected, otherwise in a world governed by weapons only the strongest and richest flourish, because instead of using their wealth and strength to care for the poor, they use them to rule over them – and that’s not righteous. What will we put our trust in? In physical solutions, in governments, in physical strength and wealth? Or do we put our trust in the God of Angel Armies, who commands peace to all nations?
Jesus comes to bring righteousness, salvation and peace, key themes that we always return to again and again during Advent and Christmas. So let’s look to Jesus for righteousness, salvation and peace this Advent, not just for ourselves, but for the whole world.
Mark