The King on a Borrowed Donkey

Bartimaeus walked every step of the long climb from Jericho to Jerusalem, staring at everything with his brand-new eyes. (He had heard goats his whole life. Now he wanted a good long look at one.) Passover was coming, and the road was packed with families going up for the feast.

Jesus walked at the front, and his friends hurried to keep up.

Near the villages of Bethphage and Bethany, at the Mount of Olives, he stopped and called two of his disciples.

"Go into the village ahead of you," he said. "As soon as you go in, you will find a colt tied there that no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks, 'Why are you doing this?' say, 'The Lord needs it, and he will send it back here soon.'"

So two grown men went off to untie a donkey that was not theirs.

The colt was right where Jesus said, tied at a door out in the street. People standing nearby frowned. "Hey! What are you doing, untying that colt?"

The disciples answered just as Jesus had told them, and the people let them go. (That is a bit like borrowing a stranger's bicycle and having the stranger say, "Oh. All right, then.")

They threw their coats over the colt's back, and Jesus sat on it. (A young donkey that has never carried anyone usually has strong opinions about its first rider. Mark does not mention any bucking.)

Then the crowd caught on. People spread their cloaks across the road, so the colt walked on a carpet of coats. Others cut leafy branches from the fields and laid them down too. People in front and behind were shouting.

"Hosanna!"

"Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!"

"Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!"

"Hosanna in the highest!"

Hosanna was an old prayer that means "Save us now!" By then people shouted it at festivals like fans at a game, but a cry for help was still inside it. Bartimaeus knew that cry. Outside Jericho he had yelled "Son of David, have mercy on me!" while people told him to hush. Now the whole crowd was yelling about David's kingdom.

God had promised this through the prophet Zechariah: "Look, your King is coming to you, humble, and riding on a donkey, on a colt."

Jesus rode down the Mount of Olives and in through the city gate, and then he went up into the temple courts. A king arriving might give a speech or sit on a throne. Jesus looked around at everything. Because it was already late, he walked back out to Bethany with the Twelve to sleep.

Many of the people on that road wanted a king to chase the Roman soldiers out. They laid their branches down for a fighter. Jesus had come to answer the cry for help inside that old shout, Save us now, and he knew the answer would cost him his life. He had told his friends so on the climb, and he rode in anyway, at a donkey's pace, straight toward it.

He kept a promise God had made through Zechariah five hundred years before. That same day he made a much plainer one to the people at that door: the colt would come back. Jesus keeps them all, from the promise in a prophet's scroll to the promise about a borrowed donkey.