Your King Comes to You, Humble

Scripture: Zechariah 7–9 (with Matthew 21:1–11 and John 12:12–16)

Before this session, read Zechariah 7–9: the question about whether to keep the old fasts and the LORD’s call for true judgment and compassion rather than empty ritual, the promises of a restored and joyful Zion to which the nations stream, the great prophecy of the King who comes humble and riding on a donkey (9:9), and the word that because of the covenant secured with blood the prisoners are set free (9:11). Then read Matthew 21:1–11 and John 12:12–16, where the Lord Jesus rides into Jerusalem and the evangelists tell us plainly that He did it to fulfill Zechariah’s word. Keep your Bible open, and ask: what kind of King comes humble and riding on a donkey, and what does it mean that He came in peace before He comes in glory?

Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion! … Look! Your king is coming to you: he is legitimate and victorious, humble and riding on a donkey.
(Zechariah 9:9)

Did You Truly Fast for Me?

Some two years after the night visions, with the temple now well on its way to completion, a delegation arrives with a question about religious observance. During the seventy years of exile the people had kept a series of fasts to mourn the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning of the temple, days of weeping fixed in the calendar of grief. Now that the temple was rising again, they wanted to know: should we keep on fasting, or may we stop? It is a reasonable, practical question, the sort of thing a church committee might bring to its pastor. But the LORD’s answer goes straight past the question to the heart behind it.

It is worth knowing what those fasts were. Across the long years of exile the people had marked the stages of Jerusalem’s fall with set days of mourning: a fast in the fourth month for the breaching of the city walls, in the fifth month for the burning of the temple, in the seventh and the tenth for other griefs of the catastrophe. They were a calendar of sorrow, a liturgy of loss, kept faithfully for seventy years. There was nothing wrong with the grief itself; the destruction of the house of God was a thing worth weeping over. But grief, too, can curdle into something self-regarding, a cherished wound nursed for its own sake, a religion of remembered injury that has quietly made the mourner the center of the whole exercise. The LORD’s question goes to exactly this: were those seventy years of tears ever really lifted toward Me, or were you only feeling sorry for yourselves all along? It is a question worth asking of our own sorrows and our own piety alike.

When you fasted and lamented in the fifth and seventh months through all these seventy years, did you truly fast for me, for me, indeed? And now when you eat and drink, are you not doing so for yourselves? (7:5–6). The LORD does not tell them whether to keep the fast; He asks them whether, in all those years of fasting, they had ever once been fasting for Him. The probing question exposes a self-centered religion that had never really been about God at all. Their fasting had been for themselves (their grief, their loss, their sense of injury) and their feasting likewise for themselves; God had been, at most, the occasion of their religion, never its object. This is a searching word for every religious person, and we should not slip out from under it. It is entirely possible to keep up a whole calendar of devout observance (fasts and feasts, services and seasons, all the outward motions of piety) and to be doing the whole thing for oneself, with God a spectator at one’s own performance. The LORD asks the question that pierces all such religion to the quick: but did you do it for Me?

Mercy, and Not Sacrifice

Having exposed the emptiness of their ritual, the LORD reminds them what He had always actually required, and it is not more fasting. Exercise true judgment and show brotherhood and compassion to each other. You must not oppress the widow, the orphan, the foreigner, or the poor (7:9–10). The word NET renders “brotherhood” is the Hebrew hesed, the loyal, steadfast mercy we have met again and again in the Twelve. This is the very heart we met in Micah: He has told you, O man, what is good, and what the LORD really wants from you: He wants you to promote justice, to be faithful, and to live obediently before your God. The worship God desires is not a performance staged before Him but a life of truth and mercy flowing from a heart that trusts Him: mercy to the brother, justice to the weak, compassion to the widow and the orphan and the foreigner and the poor. We must be careful here, for this is not the law as a ladder to climb to God; the mercy and truth God asks for are the fruit of faith, not its substitute or its price. But where there is no such fruit, where a people keep their fasts scrupulously and grind the faces of the poor the rest of the year, the fasting is exposed as the empty show it always was.

This is the oldest and most persistent of religious diseases, and the prophets fought it in every generation. Amos heard the LORD say of a people scrupulous in their festivals, I absolutely despise your festivals! … Take away from me your noisy songs. Isaiah heard Him weary of their sacrifices and their incense and their solemn assemblies, asking, When you enter my presence, do you actually think I want this? The disease is the substitution of the outward act for the inward heart: the belief that the ritual, correctly performed, is itself the thing God wants, regardless of the state of the soul that performs it. It is the conviction that the work, simply by being done, has worked. The Reformation fought the same battle under a different name, against the notion that a rite performed earns grace by the mere doing of it, apart from faith. But the error is perennial, and it is ours as much as theirs: the temptation to think that if we have shown up, gone through the motions, and kept the form, then God is satisfied, when all the while He is asking for the heart, and for the mercy and truth that flow from a heart that trusts Him.

And the LORD recalls, soberly, what came of their fathers’ refusal of this very word. The former prophets had cried the same thing, and the fathers made their heart as hard as diamond, so that they could not obey the Torah (7:12): hearts hard as the hardest stone, deliberately set against the word. And so the dreadful symmetry fell: just as I cried out, but they would not obey, so they will cry out, but I will not listen (7:13). The generation that stopped its ears against God found, in the day of its calamity, that its own cries went unheard; the scattering into exile was the harvest of hardened hearts. It is a warning the returned remnant needed, and we need: that the word refused does not simply hang in the air, but ripens, in time, into judgment. The Lord Jesus would take up Hosea’s word and press the same point against the religion of His own day, I want mercy and not sacrifice (Matthew 9:13), for the danger of a worship that is all sacrifice and no mercy is a danger in every age, including ours.

There is a fearful lesson in the fathers’ heart as hard as diamond, and it is the lesson of how hardening happens. No one becomes hard-hearted all at once; it comes by the repeated refusal of the word. Each time the word is heard and set aside, the heart grows a little more callused, a little less able to feel, until at last it is stone, so that they could not obey the Torah. The hardening is, in part, self-inflicted: a heart that has chosen, again and again, not to listen, until it has lost the power to. This is why the word refused is so dangerous: not only because judgment follows, but because the very faculty of hearing can be lost. And it is why the softened heart is so precious, and is itself the gift of God. The LORD promised through Ezekiel to take away the heart of stone and give a heart of flesh, for only He can reverse the hardening we have worked in ourselves. The right response to this warning is not to grit our teeth and try to feel more, but to pray that the God who alone can do it would give us hearts of flesh, soft to His word.

I Have Returned to Zion

But the LORD does not leave His people under the rebuke; He turns, as He so often does in the Twelve, to overwhelming promise. The LORD says, ‘I have returned to Zion and will live within Jerusalem. Now Jerusalem will be called “truthful city”’ (8:3). There is the word again that has sounded through Zephaniah and Haggai and the night visions: the LORD will dwell within, literally in the midst of, His people. The glory that had departed in the days of judgment is returning; God Himself will come back to live among them. And the city that had been a byword for unfaithfulness will be renamed truthful city, remade from the inside out by the presence of the God who is faithful and true.

That promise to dwell in the midst is the same golden thread we have followed through these last sessions, and it is worth pausing to see where it leads. From Eden, where God walked with man, through the tabernacle and the temple, the whole story has been God working His way back into the midst of His people. Here He promises to return to Zion and dwell among them again, and, read canonically, the partial return to the rebuilt temple points forward to the full return that came when the Word became flesh and took up residence among us (John 1:14), or, as the Greek literally says, pitched His tent, tabernacled, among us. In the Lord Jesus, God came to dwell in the midst of His people not in a cloud over a building but in human flesh, walking their roads and eating at their tables. And He dwells among His people still, by His Spirit, in the Church that is His temple, and will dwell with them fully and forever in the city where the residence of God is among human beings (Revelation 21:3). I have returned to Zion and will live within Jerusalem is a promise that runs straight to Christmas, and on to the new Jerusalem.

And the LORD paints the restoration in one of the tenderest pictures in all the prophets. Old men and women will once more live in the plazas of Jerusalem, each one leaning on a cane because of advanced age. And the streets of the city will be full of boys and girls playing (8:4–5). Not soldiers on the walls, not gold in the treasury, not the trappings of empire, but old people sitting safely in the sun, leaning on their canes, and children playing in the streets. That is the LORD’s picture of salvation: a city so at peace that the most vulnerable, the very old and the very young, are utterly safe and at ease in its streets. And if such a thing seems impossible to the small and harried remnant, the LORD asks gently, though such a thing may seem to be difficult in the opinion of the small community of those days, will it also appear difficult to me? (8:6). What looks impossible to us is nothing to Him; He will save His people, and they will be my people, and I will be their God, in truth and righteousness (8:8).

Ten Will Grasp Hold

The reversal the LORD promises reaches even to those days of mourning. The fast of the fourth, fifth, seventh, and tenth months will become joyful and happy, pleasant feasts for the house of Judah (8:19). The very days fixed in the calendar for weeping over the temple’s ruin will become festivals of joy, for the thing they mourned has been undone. This is the gospel’s signature work: it does not merely comfort us in our grief but turns the days of mourning themselves into feasts, as surely as the Lord Jesus would turn the deepest day of sorrow the world ever saw, the day of His cross, into the ground of the Church’s highest joy.

And then the promise opens out, as it must, to the whole world. Many peoples and powerful nations will come to Jerusalem to seek the LORD who rules over all and to ask his favor (8:22). The restoration of one small city is never, in the prophets, an end in itself; it is always the seed of a salvation meant for all the nations. And the LORD shows how it will spread, in a vivid little scene: In those days ten people from all languages and nations will grasp hold of … the robe of one Jew and say, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you” (8:23). The word for “robe” is literally the corner or hem of the garment. The nations come not because they are conquered but because they are drawn, grasping the hem of the people of God and begging to come along, for one reason: we have heard that God is with you. When the living God is truly present among His people, the nations notice, and they come. This is the Gentile ingathering we have watched promised all through the Twelve, and it is the story of the Church: the world drawn to seek the LORD because God is with you. Read canonically, it directs us to Immanuel, God with us, present among His people in the Lord Jesus.

Mark well how the nations come in this vision, for it tells us something about the mission of the Church. They are not dragged in as conquered captives; they are not converted at the point of a sword. They come freely, eagerly, grasping the hem of the people of God and pleading to be allowed to come along. And the magnet that draws them is not the cleverness of the argument or the impressiveness of the institution, but a single thing they have heard: that God is with this people. The witness of the Church to the nations has never finally been a matter of force, nor of worldly attractiveness; it is the witness of a people in whose midst the living God is plainly present, so that the world, hearing and watching, is drawn to seek Him. The Lord Jesus would put it in the same key: let your light shine before people, so that they can see your good deeds and give honor to your Father in heaven (Matthew 5:16). The nations are gathered not by our power but by the presence of God among us, made known in the Word we proclaim and made visible in lives that could not be explained any other way.

Your King Comes to You, Humble

The ninth chapter opens with an oracle of judgment sweeping down the coast: against Damascus and Hamath, against Tyre and Sidon, against the Philistine cities of Gaza and Ashkelon and Ekron and Ashdod. Many have heard in it the tramp of Alexander the Great, who two centuries later would march down exactly this coastline, toppling those very cities, and who, according to the Jewish historian Josephus, passed by Jerusalem without harming it, much as the LORD here promises: I will surround my temple to protect it like a guard … so no one will cross over against them anymore as an oppressor (9:8). The LORD guards His house while the empires clash around it. And then, against that backdrop of marching armies and falling cities, the prophet lifts his eyes and sees a different kind of King arriving.

Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion! Shout, daughter of Jerusalem! Look! Your king is coming to you: he is legitimate and victorious, humble and riding on a donkey (9:9). Here is the King the daughter of Zion has been waiting for, but mark how He comes. He is legitimate: the Hebrew word is righteous, the just and rightful King. He is victorious: the Hebrew word can mean one who has been delivered, and so comes bearing deliverance; He brings rescue with Him. But He comes humble, lowly, afflicted, and riding on a donkey. Not on a war-horse, the mount of conquerors; not at the head of an army with chariots and drawn swords; but on a donkey, the lowly mount of peace. Every other king in that chapter comes with the clash of arms; this King comes in peace, gentle and unarmed, on the back of a borrowed colt. The very animal He rides is a sermon: this is not a King who comes to crush His enemies under chariot wheels, but a King who comes humble, to save.

The contrast between the donkey and the war-horse would have been unmistakable to Zechariah’s first hearers. A king who rode out to war rode a horse, the tank of the ancient world, the very animal the next verse names among the weapons to be removed. A king who came in peace rode a donkey or a mule; it was on his father’s mule that Solomon had ridden to his peaceful coronation. So the King of this prophecy announces, by the very beast He chooses, that He comes not to make war but to make peace. And this is precisely where the crowds of Palm Sunday would stumble, for they wanted a war-horse King, a deliverer to drive out the Romans and restore the throne by force, and they got a donkey King, who wept over the city and went on to a cross. The Gospel of John notes, with quiet honesty, that even the disciples did not understand at the time what the donkey meant: His disciples did not understand these things when they first happened, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written about him (John 12:16). The lowliness that confused them is the very glory of the King: He came humble, on a borrowed colt, to save by suffering and not by the sword.

And five centuries later, on a spring morning, the Lord Jesus sent two disciples to fetch a colt, and rode it down the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem while the crowds spread their cloaks on the road and waved branches and cried Hosanna. Both Matthew and John stop to tell us, in so many words, that He did this to fulfill Zechariah’s prophecy: Tell the people of Zion, ‘Look, your king is coming to you, unassuming and seated on a donkey’ (Matthew 21:5). He chose the donkey deliberately, acting out this very verse, declaring in the language of Zechariah exactly what kind of King He was: not the military deliverer the crowds were hoping for, who would drive out the Romans and restore the throne by force, but the lowly King who had come to save by suffering. This is the verse to hold up against every dream of a political, conquering Messiah, ancient or modern. The King of Zechariah 9 does not come on a war-horse to seize an earthly throne; He comes on a donkey, and the next verse tells us what He does: I will remove the chariot from Ephraim and the warhorse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow will be removed. Then he will announce peace to the nations. His dominion will be from sea to sea and from the Euphrates River to the ends of the earth (9:10). He abolishes the weapons of war and announces peace to the nations, and His dominion stretches to the ends of the earth: not the borders of a kingdom won by the sword, but the worldwide reign of the Prince of Peace, gathered by the gospel.

That promise of universal dominion deserves a closer look, for it has often been misread as a forecast of an earthly empire. He will announce peace to the nations. His dominion will be from sea to sea and from the Euphrates River to the ends of the earth. The language echoes the great royal psalm that prayed for a King who would rule from sea to sea, and from the Euphrates River to the ends of the earth (Psalm 72:8). But notice how this dominion comes and what it is made of. It comes by announcing peace to the nations, not by conquering them but by proclaiming peace to them; and it is a dominion that begins with the removal of the chariot and the warhorse and the battle bow, the abolition of the very instruments of empire. This is no kingdom won and held by force; it is the reign of the Prince of Peace, spreading to the ends of the earth by the gospel of peace, gathering the nations not under a sword but under a cross. The Lord Jesus reigns from sea to sea wherever His peace is proclaimed and believed: a dominion vaster than any Caesar’s, and won by entirely opposite means.

The Blood of the Covenant

And how will this lowly King accomplish the salvation He brings? The next verse gives the answer, in language that anticipates words the Lord Jesus Himself would take upon His lips on the last night before He died. Moreover, as for you, because of our covenant relationship secured with blood, I will release your prisoners from the waterless pit (9:11). The Hebrew reads, quite literally, “by the blood of your covenant.” There is a covenant, and it is sealed in blood, and by that blood the prisoners are set free. The waterless pit is the dry cistern, the dungeon of the ancient world: the place where Joseph was thrown by his brothers, where Jeremiah sank in the mire, a picture of hopeless captivity, of being shut up in death with no way out and no water to keep one alive. And out of that pit the prisoners are released, by the blood of the covenant.

The phrase the blood of the covenant would have called up the deepest memories of Israel. At Sinai, when the covenant was first sealed, Moses had taken the blood of the sacrifices and splashed it on the people, saying, This is the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you (Exodus 24:8). On the night of the Passover, it was blood on the doorposts that turned away the destroyer. Through the whole life of Israel, covenant and blood were bound together, for, as the apostle says, without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness (Hebrews 9:22). A covenant between the holy God and sinful men could not be sealed cheaply; it cost blood. And so when Zechariah says the prisoners are released because of the covenant secured with blood, his words reach toward a sacrifice yet to come, a blood that would do what all the blood of bulls and goats could only picture. The whole sacrificial system, with its rivers of blood, was a long arrow pointing forward to the one blood of the one covenant that would actually open the pit and set the prisoners free.

We cannot read those words without hearing the upper room. On the night He was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took the cup and said, this is my blood, the blood of the covenant, that is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins (Matthew 26:28). Read canonically, the blood of the covenant by which the prisoners are released fittingly directs us to His blood, poured out at the cross; and the prisoners He sets free are all of us who were shut up in the waterless pit of sin and death, with no way out by any effort of our own. The lowly King who rode in on a donkey came to shed the blood of the covenant, and by that blood to open the pit and lead the captives out. This is how the King saves: not by the sword, but by His own blood; not by slaying His enemies, but by being slain for them; and the freedom He wins is the freedom of prisoners hauled up out of a dry grave into the light.

The picture of the pit is worth holding before the eye, for the Scriptures use it again and again for the helplessness of those in the grip of death. It was into a dry pit that Joseph’s brothers threw him before they sold him; it was into a cistern with no water, only mud, that Jeremiah was lowered to die. The psalmist praised the LORD because He lifted me out of the watery pit, out of the slimy mud. He placed my feet on a rock (Psalm 40:2). Dry or mired, the pit is the place of the dead and the doomed, where a man sinks with no power to climb out and no water to keep him alive, a fit picture of every sinner shut up under death. And the gospel is that the King came down to that very pit. The apostle, citing the psalm, says that when he ascended on high he captured captives (Ephesians 4:8), and that the One who ascended is the very One who first descended. The lowly King who rode the donkey went all the way down into the grave of death, and rose, and ascended as the victor, and leads His own up into the light, free.

Prisoners of Hope

And to those prisoners the LORD gives a name that is one of the loveliest in all the Scriptures: Return to the stronghold, you prisoners, with hope (9:12). The Hebrew says, literally, “prisoners of the hope,” and the older English name has rightly stuck: prisoners of hope. They are prisoners still: the full deliverance is promised, not yet entirely arrived; they live, as we do, in the time between the King’s coming in peace and His coming in glory, still in a world of trouble, still awaiting the consummation. But they are not prisoners of despair; they are prisoners of hope, held fast not by their chains but by a hope that cannot fail, captives of a promise that will surely be kept. And they are told where to go: return to the stronghold, to the LORD Himself, the stronghold and refuge of His people, the fortress to which the prisoner of hope runs and is safe.

That name, prisoners of hope, describes the whole present life of the believer with perfect precision. We are not yet fully free; we live in a world still groaning, in bodies still mortal, in the time between the King’s coming in peace and His coming in glory, and in that sense we are prisoners still. But we are not prisoners of despair, shut up in a hopeless dark; we are prisoners of hope, held fast by a promise that cannot fail. The apostle says that in hope we were saved (Romans 8:24), and that hope does not disappoint (Romans 5:5), because it rests on the faithfulness of God and the finished work of Christ. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, sure and steadfast (Hebrews 6:19), reaching into the very presence of God. So the prisoner of hope is not waiting in anxious uncertainty, wondering whether the promise will be kept; he is held by an anchor already fixed in heaven, and bidden to return, again and again, to the stronghold, until the day the prison doors are opened for good.

The chapter ends with the LORD going forth as a warrior to defend and save these prisoners of hope, and with a final, tender image: On that day the LORD their God will deliver them as the flock of his people (9:16). The people who began the section keeping empty fasts, and who are warned by the memory of their fathers’ hard hearts, end it as the rescued flock of God, prisoners of hope set free by the blood of the covenant, gathered under the lowly King who came riding on a donkey to save them. It is the whole gospel in three chapters: the empty religion exposed, the true worship named, the LORD returning to dwell in the midst, the nations drawn because God is with His people, the lowly King arriving in peace, the prisoners released by covenant blood, and the flock of God carried home. We are those prisoners of hope; the stronghold is open; the King has come.

Gathering the Threads

These three chapters move from a question about fasting to the coming of the King, and the path between them is the path of the whole gospel. The LORD exposes a religion kept for ourselves, fasts and feasts with God a mere spectator, and recalls what He has always desired: not empty ritual, but the mercy and truth and justice that are the fruit of a believing heart, the very thing the Lord Jesus pressed when He quoted Hosea, I want mercy and not sacrifice. Then He turns to promise, and the promises pile up: He will return to dwell in the midst of His people; the city will be a truthful city, with the old safe in its plazas and children playing in its streets; the days of mourning will become pleasant feasts; and the nations will take hold of the robe of His people because they have heard that God is with them.

And all of it gathers to the King who comes. He is righteous, and brings salvation; but He comes humble, riding on a donkey and not a war-horse, the Prince of Peace who removes the weapons of war and announces peace to the nations, and the Gospels tell us plainly that the Lord Jesus fulfilled this very verse on Palm Sunday, declaring by the animal He chose exactly what kind of King He is. He saves not by the sword but by the blood of the covenant, the blood He named in the upper room, by which He brings His prisoners out of the waterless pit of sin and death. And so we, who were captives with no way out, are made prisoners of hope, held not by our chains but by a promise that cannot fail, and bidden to return to the stronghold, the LORD Himself, and be safe. The King has come in peace; He will come again in glory; and between the two comings His prisoners of hope live by faith, the rescued flock of God. The things concerning Himself, written five centuries before He rode the donkey, came true to the letter, and are true for us still.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

The LORD answers the question about fasting with a sharper question: did you truly fast for me, for me, indeed? (7:5). How is it possible to keep up a whole calendar of devout observance and yet be doing it all for oneself? Where does this searching word land on our own religious life?
The worship God desires is to exercise true judgment and show brotherhood and compassion to each other and not to oppress the widow, the orphan, the foreigner, or the poor (7:9–10). Why is this mercy the fruit of faith rather than a ladder to climb to God? How does the Lord Jesus’s word I want mercy and not sacrifice press the same point on us?
The LORD pictures salvation as old people sitting safely in the plazas and children playing in the streets (8:4–5), and asks whether what seems difficult to us will also appear difficult to Him (8:6). Why does He paint peace rather than power? What does it say that nothing is too hard for Him?
The nations grasp the robe of God’s people, saying, we have heard that God is with you (8:23). How does the real presence of God among His people draw the nations? How is this fulfilled in the Church and in the Lord Jesus, Immanuel?
Look! Your king is coming to you … humble and riding on a donkey (9:9). Why does it matter that the King comes on a donkey and not a war-horse, and that the Lord Jesus chose this deliberately on Palm Sunday? How does this guard us against every dream of a political, conquering Messiah?
Because of our covenant relationship secured with blood, I will release your prisoners from the waterless pit (9:11), and the captives are called prisoners with hope, literally “prisoners of hope” (9:12). How does the Lord Jesus’s word over the cup (this is my blood, the blood of the covenant) fulfill this? What does it mean to be a prisoner of hope, held not by our chains but by a promise that cannot fail?

Looking Ahead

We have seen the King come in peace, riding lowly into His city; in the next session we begin to see the shadow of the cross fall across Zechariah’s pages, and the betrayal that would set the King’s Passion in motion. The prophet turns to the theme of shepherds (the LORD the true Shepherd of His flock, and the worthless shepherds who have scattered and devoured it) and then, in one of the strangest and most precise of all the Messianic prophecies, the rejected Shepherd asks for His wages, and is weighed out a price: thirty pieces of silver, which He is told to throw to the potter in the house of the LORD. Five centuries later, thirty pieces of silver would be counted into the hand of a betrayer, and flung down in the temple, and used to buy a potter’s field, and Matthew would tell us that in it the prophetic word was fulfilled. We turn from the King who comes to the Shepherd who is sold.

Before the next session, read Zechariah 10–11: the LORD’s anger at the false shepherds and His promise to gather His scattered flock, the strange acted parable of the good Shepherd who breaks His two staffs, and the weighing out of the price: thirty pieces of silver thrown to the potter (11:12–13). Then read Matthew 27:3–10, where Judas flings down the thirty pieces and they are used to buy the potter’s field. Ask what it means that the price of the Shepherd was foretold to the coin, five hundred years before the betrayer counted it out.

Closing Prayer

O LORD who rules over all, search our religion as You searched theirs, and show us where we have fasted and feasted only for ourselves, with You a spectator at our own performance. Forgive us the empty ritual and the hard heart; work in us instead the mercy and truth that are the fruit of faith, that we may promote justice, be faithful, and live humbly before You. Return to dwell in the midst of us, and make us a people among whom the nations may see that God is truly with us.

We bless You for the King who came to us humble, riding on a donkey: our Lord Jesus, righteous, and bringing salvation, the Prince of Peace who removes the weapons of war and announces peace to the nations. We thank You that He saved us not by the sword but by the blood of His covenant, the blood He poured out for the forgiveness of sins, by which He has released us, prisoners that we were, from the waterless pit of sin and death. Keep us as prisoners of hope, returning ever to You, our stronghold; hold us fast by the promise that cannot fail; and bring us at last from the King’s coming in peace to His coming in glory; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.