A New Policy
After a few minor changes we come to a whole new way of life — lordship replaced by humility, war by peace and the mighty horse by a donkey.
Whatever v 9 meant to Zechariah and his contemporaries, when the friends and disciples of Jesus saw Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey this was the verse and the image they called to mind (Matthew 21: 5), even if according to John (12: 16) his disciples did not really know what to make of it until much later. What might have attracted them to this verse? Was it that they recognised a different idea of kingship? Was it his persistent refusal to take up arms? Or was it simply the extremity of the symbolism? And how come they only understand it after the resurrection? Perhaps it was only when the clouds cleared and the sense of what they had been witnessing over the last three years dawned upon them, that they re-read Zechariah and suddenly the verse came alive.
For Zechariah and the Jews it was different. The cold war, for them, was over. For a thousand years they and their forbears had been having running battles with the super powers, Egypt, Babylon and Persia, and now Zechariah and his friends begin to sense the dawn of a new day when life was going to be different. As with Jesus 500 years later the mould of traditional thinking had been broken. As with him, Zechariah sensed people warming to the idea of accepting others as they were rather than as they wished them to be, as he wrestled with the reality of getting all the new inhabitants of Jerusalem to relate to one another instead of quarrelling, bickering and scoring points. Maybe the disciples began to see in Jesus something not entirely new but something similar to what Zechariah had foreshadowed.
Yet 500 years later the dream was still not fulfilled. It still isn’t, but this doesn’t stop Zechariah dreaming it, nor Jesus from expressing it, nor the disciples from proclaiming it. Nor should it stop us from learning to live with it. It may indeed never be attained but that is no reason for not rejoicing in it, because it is dreams like this that every so often cause that flash of lightning after which life is never the same again. Remember Martin Luther King. Those are the moments that change us and changing us change the world around us.