The king on a donkey

The last week of Jesus' life opens with what looks like a victory parade, and every detail of it is a deliberate statement that almost everyone missed.

When Roman generals entered a city in triumph, they rode warhorses, surrounded by soldiers and the spoils of conquest. Power announcing itself. Jesus entered Jerusalem, at Passover, with the city swollen with pilgrims, riding a borrowed donkey, exactly as the prophet Zechariah had written five centuries earlier: your king comes to you, humble and mounted on a donkey.

He was making a claim, unmistakable to anyone who knew the scroll: I am the promised king. And a correction, unmissable to anyone watching: I am not the kind of king you are expecting.

The crowds spread cloaks and palm branches on the road and shouted Hosanna, which means save us now. They wanted a liberator to drive out Rome and restore national glory. He had come to liberate them from something that had ruled humanity far longer than Rome: sin, fear, hatred, death. And his weapon would not be an army. It would be a cross.

Here is the hard part of this day. When he turned out to be the wrong kind of king, the crowd turned. Many of the same voices shouting Hosanna on Sunday were shouting something very different by Friday. People wanted a messiah who would defeat their enemies and validate their side. He refused, and refuses still, to be the mascot of anyone's agenda.

Which presses a question on all of us who like him: do I want Jesus to change my heart, or to endorse my positions? Do I want to follow him, or to recruit him? The donkey answers before we do. He comes humble, on his own terms, as the king he actually is.

Tomorrow: the day he flipped the tables.