"Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion. Look, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey's colt!" (John 12:15)

“He’s coming! He’s coming!” The cry goes up and everyone hurries to catch sight of him. The crowds flock to get a view: they wave, they shout. If you’ve ever seen film of the motorcade in Dallas, Texas, on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated you might get the idea that the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem was a bit like that: mile after mile of crowds lining the streets to welcome him - palm leaves thrown before him. You might get the idea that this seems rather overkill for a Rabbi from up-country arriving riding on a donkey. Where’s the open-top limo - or whatever the equivalent was in first century Palestine? Where are the camera crews? Or their first century equivalents - the other people who might have written accounts of this apparently tumultuous event?

The thing is, we don’t know how tumultuous Jesus’s arrival in Jerusalem really was. Chances are there were lots of folk in the city at that time who had never heard of Jesus. There would be a lot who had heard tell of a teacher up North in Galilee, but those were unsophisticated folk up there and probably a bit credulous when it came to tales of wonders. What goes on in the boondocks doesn’t really make any difference down here in the Capital. There would be others who had heard of Jesus and his teachings and weren’t especially impressed. So who were this crowd that gathered at one of the gateways to Jerusalem? Possibly a lot of them were down from Galilee for the festival. Some, perhaps, were locals who had heard him on previous visits. Some, perhaps, were people who had travelled alongside him for part of the journey. Whatever the case, they were out in numbers ready to throw their coats and their palm leaves before him when he arrived. “He’s coming! He’s coming!”

Then he arrives, riding on a donkey. You might think that’s a little underwhelming. Not at all. The words John records the people as saying are right out of Old Testament prophecy. Our text this morning comes directly from the prophecy of Zechariah. Others are from the psalm we heard earlier. The people gathered at the gate of Jerusalem would recognise the symbolism here: Jesus comes as king. This is the kingdom of God that is entering the gate. The folk who are gathered at that gate that day were welcoming the coming of God’s kingdom in the shape of this young Rabbi - this descendent of David - sitting on the back of a donkey. They were proclaiming the coming of that kingdom and identifying themselves as part of that kingdom by throwing palms and their coats before him.

Wait though! In the days to come the crowds would turn away from Jesus - or at least a lot of them would. The voices of the crowd would change from “Blessed is he who comes in the name of The Lord” to “Crucify him!” They would change from “Your king is coming” to “We have no king but Caesar!” They would go from casting palm leaves before his feet to hurling insults at him as he hung dying on the cross. Or at least many of them would. Some, a few perhaps, had entered the kingdom of God and would stay there, whatever happened next.

So what did happen? The Jews had been waiting for years - centuries even - for God to send his Messiah. They had been waiting for years for God’s kingdom to come. Yet when it arrived, so many didn’t recognise it. Why not? Perhaps there’s a clue in Jesus arriving on a donkey. In Eastern tradition the donkey was a symbol of peace: an emissary from another state arriving on a donkey meant that he came in peace. If he came on a horse he came to declare war. Here Jesus arrives as the Prince of Peace and maybe that’s not the king people wanted. Maybe people wanted a warrior to lead them in battle to free them from the might of Rome as the Maccabees had led Israel to free them from the Greeks - at least for a time.

This is the way people think about kingdoms. We think in terms of power - of our ability to prosecute war on others. We big ourselves up by having processions of missiles, or buying massively expensive weapons of mass destruction. This is what a powerful kingdom does, doesn’t it? It uses its military might to enforce its will on others - to engage in conflicts in distant parts of the world; or, at least, places nearby in the Middle East. Syria, perhaps. Or Afghanistan. Or Iraq. Then here comes Jesus, arriving on a donkey, speaking of peace. Maybe this is not the kingdom people want.

Because this is the way people think about kingdoms: as being about borders and belonging. The colour of passports, even. Kingdoms divide us up into us and them. We belong to this kingdom and they belong to another. We speak this language in this kingdom and you speak that language in that one. There are those that are in and there are those that are out and we need to have strong controls to determine who’s who, whether that’s circumcision or a nationality test: who do you cheer for during test matches? Then here comes Jesus, riding on a donkey fresh from having healed lepers and foreigners, having praised the faith of Gentiles, having engaged with Samaritans. Maybe this is not the kingdom people want.

For the kingdom of God is so often at odds with the ways of the world. That was as true two thousand years ago as it is today. The kingdom of God is based, not on power or the ability to enforce your will on others, but on love and a willingness to give yourself for others. The kingdom of God is based, not upon the things which divide us by tribe or language or culture or colour, but on the compassion we can have, as human beings, for those who seem so different from us, but who know the same fears, the same needs, the same pains and the same joys that we do. The kingdom of God is based, not upon a king who stands aloof from the lives of his subjects at some towering distance, but who lives among us: our brother. This is the king who arrived at the gate of Jerusalem, riding on a donkey.

The kingdom of God is love. It is the love of a Father for all his children. It is the love that binds us together as children of that Father; that binds us together as brothers and sisters, whatever the colour of our skin or the colour of our passports. It is the love that bestrides borders to care for the weak and the poor and the broken, whatever their background. It is a kingdom of the heart. It is a kingdom which, in the days after Palm Sunday, the people of Jerusalem - the world - rejected.

But not all. There were some who gathered that Sunday who would see it through. They had stepped through the gateway of the Kingdom and would face difficult days, but they would face them with confidence. They would go on to proclaim that kingdom by living out the teachings of Christ: they would do their best to love their neighbours as they loved themselves. They would do their best to put the needs of others ahead of their own. They would do their best to be a vision of humanity bound together as one. They would proclaim the love of God in Jesus Christ, first to Jerusalem and then to the whole world. We are the spiritual descendants of those people

All that though, is yet to come. This is still Palm Sunday. In the days to come the world would seek to snuff out the kingdom of God which stands so much at odds with the ways of the world. Come again next Sunday to see how that panned out.

Lord, we have entered the gateway to your Kingdom and you have welcomed us. May we live as citizens of your Kingdom by following in the way of your Son

Preached at Gretna Old parish church