The Maasai people are herdsmen. Each night, they drive their goats into traditional thorn-fenced enclosures around their mud and stick homes. The youngest and weakest goats are kept inside the entrance to the house itself. We tend to associate stables with dirtiness, bugs, etc... the last place you'd want to have a baby. To them, Christ's birth in a stable is completely unremarkable. Most likely, this was a common sentiment of Jesus's contemporaries.
This makes a lot of sense when we begin to think about what these people must have been thinking when the Messiah rode into Jerusalem. They thought primarily in political terms. The Christ was going to bring liberty to the persecuted Jew. When Jesus began his ministry, they were probably surprised at first that he was not in any way nobility, but his presence as a normal person was even better - this was a revolution, and who better to stick it to the man than one of us? People were understandably excited. Normal people were finally going to receive justice; they were going to have power; the Messiah was there for them!
Large crowds danced and celebrated his entrance to Jerusalem. They followed wherever the Messiah went. They were fully expecting to be redeemed. This was the perfect revolution: A new government was going to be founded under the principles of their religion overseen by their religious leaders. It sounds a lot like the Arab Spring but even better; The Messiah could work miracles and he was a normal citizen.
But it all ended up being a very brief flash in the pan. The first thing Christ did when he entered Jerusalem? Come unhinged in the temple, throwing out the money tables and calling it a den of thieves. For the next few days, he attacked the corrupt Jewish leadership, said nothing against the Romans, and seemed more interested in changing people's spiritual lives than pursuing any real physical revolution. Most people weren't buying this type of revolution. The religious leaders were hurt, defensive, and ready to do anything to stop a raving lunatic. By the end of the week, Jesus was dead. Some revolution.
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This Easter season, let's recenter our lives on His revolution.