The People with the Donkeys
Notes
Transcript
It is so easy for us to get caught up in the stories of great men and women whose names are written down for all to know throughout history.
We think of people like Moses or Ruth or the Apostle Paul. If you are familiar with more recent church history, you might think of people like C.H. Spurgeon or Amy Carmichael or Adrian Rogers…great men and women who did incredible things that shaped history and left lasting impacts for the kingdom of God.
The reality is that most of us, if not all of us, will never be those people.
Our lives are going to be filled with normal moments of walking with Jesus and trying to stay faithful, and history may never remember our names.
What does the Bible say to people like that?
As we get ready to celebrate some of the most monumental events in human history—namely Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection—we are going to take some time to focus on the minor characters whose lives were impacted along the way.
We are calling this little mini-series “Majoring on the Minors” as we look at some of the people we might be tempted to overlook when we talk about these major events.
Some of these characters are so minor that we don’t even know their names and may know next to nothing about them, yet we can learn something about ourselves and God’s activity as we examine their lives.
There is no question that all these accounts are primarily about Jesus, but as we look at them, we can glean some truths that help us see how God works in the lives of normal, everyday people.
So where do we pick up this morning? Let’s look at Mark 11:1-11 to see what we often call the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem and the passage that we draw the name “Palm Sunday” from.
In the middle of all this activity, we are going to see some unnamed people who play a critical role in what God is doing, although they may have been largely unaware.
We don’t know their names, so we are just going to call them “the people with the donkeys.”
If you’re not familiar with what happened here, that may sound really weird. It will make sense in a minute.
Let’s look at the passage and make a few observations, and then we will come back and focus directly on these minor characters.
Read verses 1-11 with me…
Jesus had been healing and doing miraculous works and a large crowd has been following him.
He is heading into Jerusalem, and he is doing so in a way that excites the crowds because that is how pilgrims would normally come into the city.
However, unlike the normal religious pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem in those days, Jesus is fulfilling some specific prophecies in the Old Testament about how God’s special servant, the Messiah, or the Christ, would come into Jerusalem.
Jesus sends two of his disciples into the surrounding villages and asks them to find a colt for him to ride on. Matthew and Luke give us more detail, letting us know this isn’t just the colt of a horse. Instead, this is a young donkey that they are to get for Jesus to ride on.
Why does that matter? Because Jesus is fulfilling prophecies from Isaiah and Zechariah about the Messiah and how he would come to Jerusalem.
This took place so that what was spoken through the prophet might be fulfilled: Tell Daughter Zion, “See, your King is coming to you, gentle, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
Instead of coming in on a majestic war horse or a chariot, the special servant God promised rode into the city humbly, riding on a young donkey.
The crowd is excited about Jesus, but they don’t seem to fully understand the significance of what is going on.
They are cutting palm branches and laying them on the ground for Jesus and the donkeys to walk on.
In one sense, it is a beautiful moment of God fulfilling promises he made hundreds of years before.
In another, there is a tragic irony in the fact that the city Jesus is riding into will reject him and crucify him in a matter of days.
Now, wrapped up in the middle of all of the celebration and majesty of this, you have some unnamed people who God uses in a crucial way. Who is that? The people who owned the donkeys.
Nobody knows their name or who they were. We don’t know how well they knew Jesus, if this was a prearranged plan, or anything else. Luke does tell us in his retelling of the events that the people who gave them permission were the ones who owned the donkey, but that’s all we know.
All we know about them is that they had a donkey with a colt that they were willing to give Jesus when he needed them.
You might have glossed over them the first time, so go back to verses 2-6 and look at them again.
It’s kind of a crazy scene, isn’t it? A couple guys walk up and start untying a donkey. The people standing there ask what they are doing, they tell them Jesus needs it, and the people let them take them and go.
Because of how God was working, these minor characters got to play a major role in Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem.
It’s a really neat account, isn’t it?
But what does that mean for you and for me?
I think we can draw at least three principles from the people with the donkeys that apply to the rest of us as we follow Christ.
First, we need to recognize that…
1) God has been working for a long time.
1) God has been working for a long time.
One beautiful detail you can’t overlook in this passage is how God worked to bring the timing of all of it together.
God had been at work for a long time to set the stage for how he was going to work in these people’s lives.
Do you know how long donkeys are pregnant? We might have a few livestock vets in the room who know this, but I had to mess up my search algorithm this week to look up the gestational length of donkeys.
I found out that donkeys are pregnant for 11-14.5 months.
Do you know how old a donkey is supposed to be before you ride it? Technically, the internet says about 4 years old, but that is also when you stop calling them a colt, so this donkey was probably a little younger than that.
Why does that matter? Because that means God put this piece of his plan in motion at least 3-5 years before this moment.
We say that quickly, but that’s a really long time!
Jesus’s public ministry was only about 3 years long, so it is possible that Jesus wasn’t even ministering publicly yet when this foal was born.
Do you think the owners had any idea when their donkey got pregnant that the foal of that donkey would one day carry the Son of God on its back in fulfillment of a specific prophecy?
Let’s take it even farther back…
We said Jesus is fulfilling a prophecy from the book of Zechariah.
He wrote that prophecy somewhere between 500-550 years before these events.
God hadn’t just been working this plan out for 5 years; he has been working it for 500!
We can go even farther back, because these events were all part of the fulfillment of God’s plan to save the world.
Ephesians 1:4 tells us that God chose to save us before the world was even founded, so this plan has been in motion since before time began!
The people with the donkey had no idea when that donkey got pregnant and had this colt that they would have the privilege of stepping into God’s plan of redemption that he had been bringing to bear throughout human history.
You and I may not get to have the donkey that Jesus rode on, but we need to recognize that the same God who worked all those details out to bring this moment to bear is still doing the same thing today.
He is always at work around you. He is always doing far more than we see:
“God is always doing 10,000 things in your life, and you may be aware of three of them.”
(John Piper)
[1]
Isn’t that what we have seen in Job? Job had no clue that what God was defending his honor before Satan and while at the same time giving generations to come incredible insight into the nature of suffering that we would not have otherwise.
We don’t know what God is doing or how he is going to work. We may see it in five years like the donkey’s owners, or like Job, we may never understand fully in this life. God may be setting things in motion that won’t come to fruition for 500 more years!
I have no idea what is going on in your life, but I do know that the God who worked in their lives is still working today.
God had been setting the stage for all this, but the owners of the donkey had no idea.
Trust that God knows what he is doing and watch for him to do the unexpected.
Here’s where it gets tough though.
When the time comes to join what God is doing,
2) You may not get many details.
2) You may not get many details.
All they were told was that Jesus needed the donkey. Some translators think the statement “will send it back here” should actually be translated more like “and needs you to send to him now.”
This is a pattern we see all throughout the Bible. God often calls people to take steps of obedience without giving them a lot of instructions.
One clear example of this is Abraham. God called him to move, but he didn’t tell him where he was moving to. He proved Abraham’s faith by seeing if he would be willing to trust God and sacrifice his own son if asked.
We see it in all the disciples. When Jesus called them, all he told them was to follow him.
The owners of the donkey weren’t given details, and you may not be either.
Are you okay with that?
Can you trust an unknown future to a known God?
Because, you see…
3) Your job is to respond by obeying.
3) Your job is to respond by obeying.
I love the simplicity of that last line in verse 6…
The disciples told them that Jesus needed the donkeys, and the owners let them go.
They took the donkeys to Jesus and he rode them into Jerusalem.
He received a small bit of the glory he should have that day, even if the crowds didn’t really understand what was taking place.
And you know what? No one remembers their name.
They had faithfully raised this donkey, and they obeyed when the time came.
They didn’t hesitate or deliberate; they simply did what God asked them to do.
As a result, Jesus got the glory.
That should be our goal in life as well.
If you walk out of here today and don’t remember the name of a single person here but know Jesus better, then we have done what we were supposed to do.
Your job is not to secure your legacy or make a mark in history; your job is to do whatever you can to point people to the Messiah who rode into town on a donkey that day.
Your job is to help your kids, your co-workers, your classmates, your cashiers, and whoever else you come into contact with find and follow Jesus.
While we remember the obedience of the donkey’s owners, the story really is all about the one who rode them that day.
He was coming into Jerusalem to fulfill prophecies that had been in motion since before time began. God had promised to save us from our sin, and Jesus was coming to do just that.
He knew the details of what that would mean—Jesus, God in the flesh, would suffer and die for the sins of the world.
Instead of turning from the path and plan ahead of him,
he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death— even to death on a cross.
Three days later, he would show that he defeated sin and death by rising from the grave.
Because of all he did,
For this reason God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow— in heaven and on earth and under the earth— and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Like the owners of the donkeys, our names may get lost to the records of history.
However, let us rest in the fact that God is at work in ways we may not yet understand, that he may not give us all the information we want, but that as we obey, we will have the privilege of joining in the plan God has been working from eternity past to save the world.
You may be here this morning and have never entered into a relationship with Jesus.
This is what he is calling you into. He is inviting you into the plan that is bigger than you or I could imagine; the plan to redeem the world.
He loves you so much that he wants to adopt you as his child and enable you to walk with him in this life and forever.
You may not understand all that it means to follow him, but are you willing to respond to his call this morning and surrender your life to him?
I can’t promise the world will remember your name, but I can promise that the God who died for you will.
Let’s pray…
Endnote:
[1] https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/god-is-always-doing-10000-things-in-your-life
