In my last blog post, Jesus and Palm Sunday, I talked about how Jesus committed sedition by climbing on a donkey and riding down the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem. Every Jew of his time knew the tradition of “Mashiach’s Donkey”—the oracle of the prophet Zechariah about a coming Mashiach (“Messiah” in English) who would someday enter Jerusalem riding on a donkey. They knew many other traditions about Mashiach from oracles in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah, Micah, and various other prophets: That he would restore the kingdom of his father David. That he would reunite the two tribes of the …
Messiah
Great Expectations on Baby Jesus
The world we live in is a very different world than the world Jesus of Nazareth was born into. A king ruled over Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. His name was Herod the Great, and he was a savage man who killed his favorite wife because he thought she was cheating on him. He killed three of his sons because he thought they might try to push him off the throne and steal it for themselves. The gospel of Matthew tells a story of how Herod the Great ordered the murders of all the infant sons in Bethlehem under the age …