Bonecrusher

Armored Black Horse, by Naia-Art

Lectionary: The Sixth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 14), AD 2026 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

When I was a child, I learned to ride horses at summer camp. Our instructors assigned the other kids to gentle mares with names like Marigold or Honeysuckle. But they put little elementary-school me on the back of a great big ink-black stallion named Bonecrusher. Apparently his name had been Midnight, once upon a time, but he earned this new monicker after a number of unfortunate incidents that the summer camp didn’t want to go into.

So I earned my spurs on a horse that felt twice the size of everyone else’s, and who had apparently developed a taste for blood. Suffice to say, I rode him very gingerly. All told, I might’ve preferred Marigold.

The Bible is surprisingly anti-horse, which might surprise Americans. For us the horse means freedom, the open range, the Wild West. Before the car, the horse embodied American independence. We all have a cowboy phase. We all love a good Western. But the Bible doesn’t like horses, because horses mean war. In the Ancient Near East, horses pulled chariots, not ploughs. Whoever showed up on a horse was up to no good.

Examples of this are many. Trusting in horses was a sign of bad faith, according to the Prophets Isaiah, Micah, and Haggai. The Psalmist sings that God delights not in the strength of the horse, while Esther, Jeremiah, and Haggai again, all treat them as symbols for war. Put frankly, the horse was part of the arsenal of imperial control. And Israel knew exactly what it meant to live beneath the boot of an empire. They had extensive experience.

Our sacred Scriptures much prefer to laud the humble donkey. Rulers ride donkeys in the Book of Judges. God speaks through a donkey to the prophet Balaam. Samson uses the jawbone of a wild ass to slay a thousand foes. When we come to the monarchy, David’s sons ride mules, which were apparently considered the Lexus of donkeys, as they had to be imported. That’s because Jewish religious Law forbade the domestic hybridization of animals. Thus, royals rode donkeys to indicate their humility, and mules when they were feeling fancy.

We must keep all this in mind as we turn to this morning’s reading from the Prophet Zechariah:

Rejoice, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem;  and the battle-bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to see and from the River to the ends of the earth.

As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit. Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope; today I declare that I will restore to you double.

Zechariah is a priest and a prophet of the Return. A century earlier, the mighty Chaldeans of the Neo-Babylonian Empire had displaced the previous bad guys, the Assyrians, and conquered the Southern Israelite Kingdom of Judah. Thus began the Babylonian Exile, 70 years during which the movers and shakers of Judah—everybody who was anybody—were uprooted from their homes and scattered across the Empire, strangers in a strange land.

By rights, that should’ve been the end of them. Yet it proved their true beginning. Denuded of their Temple, king, and land, they became People of the Book, compiling the Torah, following the Prophets, praying for the Messiah to come and set them free. Miraculously, the Jewish people not only survived but flourished. And just as the Prophets had promised, a new Persian Empire arose, displacing the Neo-Babylonians and undoing the Exile. The people of God could now go home, to reclaim and rebuild what they had lost.

Zechariah was amongst those who had returned, filled with the ardor of a prophet and the Spirit of his God. And he proclaims the coming of the long-awaited King. Yet he insists that this will not be the return to things as they had been before. This promised King, this Messiah, would be no conqueror, no warmonger. The only war that He shall wage shall be against war itself. He will ride in on a donkey, as a peacemaker, cutting the horses free from their chariots, breaking the battle-bow.

And He shall declare peace: peace, not conquest. His dominion shall know no limits, imperium sine fine. And He shall set the prisoners free, not simply from prison, not only from Exile, but from the waterless Pit—from Sheol, the grave, the land of the dead. Zechariah isn’t preaching about the Persians. He isn’t prophesying Cyrus or Darius, the Emperors of Iran. They have already come; the Exiles have returned. No, the rule of this Messiah, this Donkey-King, goes far beyond the clash of worldly arms.

Witness the vastness of the chasm betwixt the Empire on one hand and divine Kingship on the other. Ancient peoples believed, rather understandably, that the strongest nations had the strongest gods; that whatever dominant empire of the day manifested the Mandate of Heaven. The strong do what they will, while the weak suffer what they must. Surely that alone is proof of divine endorsement. Whom, after all, do you suppose God truly favors in the web: the spider or the fly?

But Zechariah turns all of these assumptions on their heads. The One True God elects slaves over Pharaoh, little Judah against Assyria, the Exiles out of Babylon. Time and again He chooses the younger brother, the weaker champion, David over and against Goliath. A God of infinite power places no value on horses, no value on war. He is the God of the last and the least, of the little and the lost; God of the fallen sparrow; God of the widow and orphan; God of the poor, the despised, and the enslaved.

The King shall come, triumphant and victorious, humble and riding on a donkey, cutting off the chariots, shattering the spears, releasing the prisoners, and raising up the dead! This is why, 500 years after Zechariah, Christ would ride into Jerusalem for the last time, on Palm Sunday, upon the back of a donkey, while the whole city seemed to lose its mind. This is why Mary is said to have ridden upon a donkey to Bethlehem in order to give birth. Christ comes not to conquer in the ways that an army conquers, but to break the spine of death—to fill up Hell to bursting with the life and light of God!

Like I said, Americans love our horses. They symbolize Westward expansion, our Manifest Destiny. They symbolize our empire from sea to shining sea; and beyond that now, throughout the Atlantic and Pacific and even the orbital domains of Outer Space. We who fought an empire for our Independence—the greatest empire the world had ever known—how have we not now become the very thing we hated? How have we not trusted in the chariot and the horse? How have we not learned to ride the Bonecrusher?

Yet take heart, and never despair. “God’s delight is not [and never has been] in the might of the horse, [but] in those who hope in His steadfast love.” Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion. See, your King comes to you. Triumphant and victorious is He, humble and riding on a donkey. He shall cut off the chariot and the warhorse. He shall command peace to the nations, and set the prisoners free. He shall end every empire and wage eternal peace—raising up from out the grave the dead and the damned.

He shall beat our swords into ploughshares, our spears to pruning-hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall they learn war anymore. For the King is come!

And Christ shall save us all.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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