Jesus's Acts of Love: Matt. 21:1-11

Jesus’s act of love was to ask his disciples to do something ridiculous.  He asked them to take a stranger’s donkey with a foal trailing along her and bring it to him.  The explanation they were to give the donkey’s owner was equally weird. “My  Master needs them!”  Then Jesus did something even more bizarre. He mounted — not the donkey — but the colt, an unbroken, skittish yearling!  Christ was about to enter Jerusalem in triumph, but riding an animal that was untrained, unpredictable.  Should he not have mounted a war horse, some royal steed, instead? The Lord climbed on the back of a lowly beast of burden, young and short, so that Jesus’s feet may well have been dragging along in the dust as they proceeded down the palm strewn road.

The results of this nonsensical act of love resulted in the fulfillment of prophecy in Zechariah 9:9  Jesus’s act initiated his triumphal procession as the Messianic king, but in a totally unexpected manner.

How do we apply this act of love to our lives?  At any time the Lord may ask you to do something absurd, something that makes no sense, an action that appears ludicrous to the world. But that act will be God’s way of completing his will, perhaps even fulfilling something he had prophesied. He may ask you to do something humbling, something that will kick up ridicule and scorn.  He may ask you to do something beyond your comprehension.  But that is how he loves us — radically!