This is a story and a teaching about power, and about the very old belief that heaven backs whoever is winning. People have believed it for thousands of years, that the biggest army and the highest throne must have God behind them. A lot of people still feel some version of it when they look at whoever is rich and strong.
One afternoon a crowd of about five thousand people decided to take Jesus by force and make him their king, and he got away from them and climbed a mountain by himself.
So let us go out to that hillside and watch what happened, and then follow him all the way to the morning he stood in front of a Roman governor and said what his kingdom was actually made of.
The afternoon on the hillside
It was springtime, near the Passover, on the grassy hills on the far side of the Sea of Galilee, a freshwater lake up in the north.
A crowd had followed Jesus out there because they had seen him heal sick people. It was late in the day. There was no food out there and nowhere to buy any. A boy in the crowd had five small barley loaves and two little fish. Jesus took them, thanked God for them, and had his followers hand the food out. About five thousand men ate, and their families with them. The followers picked up twelve baskets of leftover pieces afterward.
Then the crowd started talking to each other about what they had just watched.
They were full. They were excited. And they came to a decision together, out there on the grass, that this was the man who should be running the country. Not a request. Not a vote. They were going to take hold of him and put him on the throne whether he agreed or not.
When Jesus therefore perceived that they would come and take him by force, to make him a king, he departed again into a mountain himself alone.John 6:15
He saw it coming and he left. He went up the mountain by himself, and the crowd stayed down on the grass with the baskets.
What that crowd wanted
Those people lived under Rome. Roman soldiers walked their roads. Roman taxes took their money. They had grown up waiting for a king who would come with a sword and drive Rome out.
That was the crown they were holding out on that hillside. A war crown, a throne held up by an army.
In Rome itself, the emperor was called a god. The coins in those people’s own pockets carried words that meant son of God, next to the emperor’s face. The throne, the army, and heaven were all one thing, gathered into one man on one seat.
Jesus walked up a hill instead.
He had heard the offer once already
That afternoon was not the first time the whole world’s power had been laid out in front of him.
Before any of the miracles and before any crowd knew his name, he had spent forty days alone in the dry wilderness country, eating nothing. At the end of it a tempter came to him with an offer.
Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.Matthew 4:8-10
Every kingdom, all of the glory, handed over in one moment, in exchange for one bow.
He said no. Not later, no.
The day he rode into Jerusalem
Later, near the end of his life, he did finally ride into the capital city in front of a crowd.
A conqueror came into a city on a war horse, high up, soldiers walking behind him, so that everyone watching understood that power had arrived.
Jesus sent two of his followers ahead to fetch a donkey and her colt, and he rode in on the young donkey with people laying their coats on the road in front of him.
Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass.Matthew 21:5
He was living out a promise written hundreds of years earlier. Zechariah was a prophet who spoke to the people after they came home from exile. The next line of that promise says what the donkey is for.
And I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off: and he shall speak peace unto the heathen.Zechariah 9:10
The chariot gone, the war horse gone, the bow snapped. This king rides in to speak peace.
The morning he stood in front of Pilate
A few days after that ride, soldiers arrested him at night in a garden and took him in chains to the house of Pontius Pilate.
Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor of Judea. Rome sent him there to keep the province quiet and to collect its taxes. He was the only man in the region who could order somebody put to death. He had soldiers in the courtyard. Jesus stood in front of him tied up.
Pilate asked him whether he was a king.
Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.John 18:36
He gave Pilate the test right there. If my kingdom worked the way yours does, my people would be outside fighting to keep me. Nobody is fighting. This crown needs no army to hold it up.
What kind of king he was
He never said he was not a king. Standing in chains in front of the man who could kill him, he told Pilate that he was one.
What he let go of was the sword and the throne and the idea that heaven runs the world by force. He kept the crown and he changed what a crown is.
And he said unto them, The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and they that exercise authority upon them are called benefactors. But ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve.Luke 22:25-26
The kings of the world stand on top of people and call that greatness. In his kingdom the greatest one is the one who serves. He said it out loud, and then on his last night he knelt on a floor and washed his friends’ dirty feet like the lowest servant in the house.
If you have ever been small under someone big, worn down by a boss or a bully or a whole system that treats winning as proof of who God loves, this is your king. He walked away from the biggest throne on earth. He came down to the floor where you are. He measures greatness by love, so there is room at the top for the people the world pushed to the bottom.
Isn’t it a wonderful thing that a crowd of five thousand hungry people offered him a country, and he handed it back. Now you know why the donkey is in the story, and why the towel is too. They are the same idea, twice. Some of the teachings ahead ask harder things of us, loving an enemy among them, and that is the point. It is a journey, not one moment of understanding.
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