Our Expectations and God’s – Zechariah 9:9-12

A text – Zechariah 9:9-12

⁹ Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!  Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
¹⁰ He 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.

¹¹ As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.
¹² Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope; today I declare that I will restore to you double.

A reflection:

This week’s texts are about people’s expectations and how the Lord often confounds them. In Matthew we read Jesus’s lament, a sort of ”damned if you do, damned if you don’t” account of the religious leaders of his day and their reactions to both John the Baptist and Jesus and their ministries. Nothing either man did conformed to people’s expectations of a prophet or a savior.

This passage of Zechariah, written over 500 years before Jesus came, prophesied a new king for Israel who would reign in peace, freeing prisoners and restoring the nation, around the time the Hebrew nation had been released from their exile and Babylon and encouraged by Cyrus the Great of Persia to return home and rebuild their temple. The new king in this passage doesn’t look like a vanquishing warrior, because he rides a donkey instead of a war horse. But he has power, and he will use it to free people.

By the time Jesus arrived people knew this prophesy. Even if Jesus fulfilled it by riding into Jerusalem on a colt, the foal of a donkey, the people still expected he would vanquish Rome and every other bad things that beset them in order to free them from bondage. He would be a mighty king.  But Jesus came to free human beings from a different kind of bondage that they weren’t even imagining or expecting to be freed from. Jesus came to free them from the bondage of death, eternal separation from God. He came not to conquer a military foe but to conquer the eternal severing power of death. The people were hoping for one thing, but Jesus was delivering another. Perhaps that’s why Zechariah calls the people in verse 12 “prisoners of hope.” They are held captive, prisoners, by their mistaken ideas of what the Messiah will free them from. For many, they could not let go of that vision, even for the Son of God.

How often we need to be quiet, get away by ourselves as Jesus so often did, and sit with God, praying that God might free us from our own limited ideas of what would be good, and aligning us with God’s vision for us and the world that God loves. I’m going to try to pray in that way more often this week.

A prayer:

Lord God, Thank you for loving us. Thank you for reminding us in scripture that what we seek is usually not what you seek for us. Help us to remember to sit with you, be with you, and let our expectations be shaped by your love for us. Amen.