Your King Comes

In context

Zechariah tells Zion that her King comes to her, “righteous, and having salvation; lowly, and riding on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (Zechariah 9:9), the prophecy Matthew and John recall when Jesus rides into Jerusalem (Matthew 21:4–5; John 12:14–15). The same chapter calls the people “prisoners of hope” (Zechariah 9:12).

Told to feed “the flock of slaughter,” Zechariah feeds it with two staffs named Favor and Union, and is paid “thirty pieces of silver,” which he throws “to the potter in Yahweh’s house” (11:4–13); Matthew tells of Judas’s thirty pieces of silver and the potter’s field (Matthew 27:3–10). “They will look to me whom they have pierced,” the Lord says, words John quotes at the cross, and “Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered,” words Jesus quoted the night before he died (Zechariah 12:10; 13:7; John 19:37; Matthew 26:31).

The last chapter is hard in places, with a city taken in war, and readers understand it in different ways (Zechariah 14:1–2). It goes on to the Lord’s feet on the Mount of Olives, living waters going out from Jerusalem, and “HOLY TO YAHWEH” on the bells of the horses (14:4, 8, 20).