MATTHEW 21:5

“Say to Daughter Zion, ‘See, your king comes to you, gentle and riding on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’”

TO PONDER

I was a youth pastor for well over 10 years. I was an expert in humans of the teen variety. I had counselled parents and their troubled teenagers on too many occasions to count. Within our church, I was the one to seek out when you needed help with your young person.

See, I knew teens and their angst towards parents… until I graduated to living with one of those argumentative, know-it-all, non-listening, rebellious angels of my own. Then I realised I was no longer the expert.

We get to read in the gospels time and time again. The interactions between Jesus and the experts in messiah lore, between Jesus and his apprentices (also called disciples), between Jesus and his family who knew him best, and with Jesus and total strangers. We read how wrong people were with who they thought Jesus was  and who they thought he should be.

In today’s verse we read Zechariahs’ prophecy of the coming Messiah, given some 500 years before it was happening here in the gospel, the future king of the Jews, now come in the flesh arriving on a donkey only to die a criminal’s death. We read again and again how unexpected this King of the Jews was, how wrong the experts, how wrong his disciples, how wrong even his family were about the expected Messiah, now arrived among them.

Now, over 2,500 years on from the prophecy given in Zechariah and over 2,000 years since His incarnate arrival intersected the history of the World, knowing what is written within both the Old and New Testaments, even knowing the end of the story we often continue to make the same mistakes.

Jesus is still so much more, so different, than what most of us expect.

PRAYER: Almighty God, You are the true King, the King who came down form glory as a servant, the King who gave his all to redeem the world through your death on the cross. Amen

Today's devotion written by Danny Brock, LifeWay Westside