Jesus arranges the entry in advance. He tells two disciples where to find a colt 30"on which no one has ever yet sat," what the owners will ask, and what to answer: 31"The Lord has need of it." The disciples find it 32"just as he had told them." Nothing about the day catches him off guard. The Lord who needs the colt is also the Lord who knows where it is tied. He rides in on an untried colt, the picture of the gentle king Zechariah promised, humble and mounted on a donkey (Zechariah 9:9), and not on a warhorse.
The crowd throws its cloaks on the colt and spreads them on the road (verses 35-36), treating him as a king. They are already on the way down the Mount of Olives (verse 37), and the descent leads straight to the city. The crowd bursts out in joy: 38"Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!" It echoes the song of the angels at his birth (Luke 2:14). When some Pharisees ask him to rebuke his disciples, he answers 40"if these were silent, the very stones would cry out." The praise is simply true, and creation would supply the words if the disciples failed to.
Then in a single verse everything shifts: 41"he wept over it." The King the crowd has been celebrating rides toward the city that will kill him within the week, and his first response to the sight of it is tears. The city whose name carries the word peace has spent the day cheering its king while unaware of what peace required. 42"But now they are hidden from your eyes." A window that had been open is closing, and Jesus sees it close while the crowd around him is still singing.
What follows is grief speaking as plainly as prophecy. Enemies will set up a barricade, surround the city, hem it in on every side, and tear it down, and they will 44"leave one stone upon another" in none of it. The details match what Roman armies under Titus would do to Jerusalem about forty years later, in AD 70. Jesus names the cause in one sentence: 44"you did not know the time of your visitation."
The word visitation has a history in this Gospel. Zechariah used it to say that God has visited and redeemed his people (Luke 1:68), and Anna spoke to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem (Luke 2:38). Here it closes a circle in the saddest way. God has visited Jerusalem in the flesh, riding through its gates on a borrowed colt, and the city, cheering that same day, does not recognize the visitation for what it was.
Ask where a visit from God might be passing you right now, in a person, a prompting, or an ordinary morning, and ask for eyes to know it.
Prayer
Father, thank you for a King who wept over the city that would soon reject him, grieved by their blindness to the peace he was offering. Let us not miss our own day of visitation as Jerusalem missed hers, cheering loudly while the things that make for peace pass unrecognized in front of us. Open our eyes to see what you have come to give. In Jesus' name, amen.