Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, your King comes unto you: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon a donkey, and upon a colt the foal of a donkey.
All Commentaries on Zechariah 9:9 Go To Zechariah 9
Irenaeus of Lyons
AD 202
A spiritual disciple of this sort truly receiving the spirit of God, who was from the beginning, in all the dispensations of God, present with humankind, and announced things future, revealed things present, and narrated things past—[such a person] does indeed “judge all men but is himself judged by no man.” For he judges the Gentiles, “who serve the creature more than the Creator,” and who with a reprobate mind spend all their labor on vanity. And he also judges the Jews, who do not accept the word of liberty nor are willing to go forth free, although they have a deliverer present [with them]. But they pretend, at a time unsuitable [for such conduct], to serve, [with observances] beyond [those required by] the law, God who stands in need of nothing. And [they] do not recognize the advent of Christ, which he accomplished for the salvation of humanity. Nor are [they] willing to understand that all the prophets announced his two advents: the one, indeed, in which he became a man subject to stripes, and knowing what it is to bear infirmity, and sat upon the foal of an ass, and was the stone rejected by the builders, and was led as a sheep to the slaughter, and by the stretching forth of his hands destroyed Amalek. … He gathered from the ends of the earth into his father’s fold the children who were scattered abroad. … [He] remembered his own dead ones who had formerly fallen asleep and came down to them that he might deliver them. But [in the second advent] he will come on the clouds, bringing on the day which burns as a furnace, and striking the earth with the word of his mouth, and judging the impious with the breath of his lips. Having a fan in his hands, he cleanses his floor, and gathering the wheat indeed into his barn, he burns the chaff with unquenchable fire. .
