I some might be thinking I have my holidays confused. Palm Sunday is the Sunday before Easter, not Christmas!
The year 1809 was a very good year. Those alive at that time didn’t know it though. If you were living then you would have been focused on Napoleon marching across Austria seizing and destroying villages and cities. During that same period of time thousands of babies were born in Britain and America. But who would have cared about babies and bottles or cribs and cradles while Napoleon was doing his thing in Austria.
But during 1809, Alfred Tennyson began his life in Lincolnshire. Oliver Wendell Holmes cried out for the first time in Cambridge, Mass. Edgar Allen Poe was born in Boston. Charles Robert Darwin was also born. And in a little log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky, an illiterate worker and his wife named their newborn son, Abraham Lincoln. The lives of these men would make an enormous impact on our world as we know it but nobody really cared about them while Napoleon was on the loose. Today, only a history buff could tell you one battle that Napoleon fought, but every one of us has been touched in some way by these others I’ve named.
If we’d have been living in the first century our eyes would have been turned toward Herod and not toward a teenage couple, Mary & Joseph, who were expecting a son whom they would name Jesus.
The One whom one day would provide salvation to all who would come and fulfill the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9 and ride in on a colt on the day we know as Palm Sunday.
The King has come!
