God Save Us!: A Sermon for Palm Sunday

Photo by Pastor Nate Elarton on subsplash.com

Typically on Palm Sunday, I have preached on the absurdity of the people waving their palms and cheering as Jesus entered into Jerusalem and then, a mere five days later, calling for his crucifixion and death. It is easy to get excited and angry about how people flowed quickly from praising their Messiah to demanding Pontius Pilot hang him up next to the other criminals.

The actions of the crowd still irk me, but today I thought I would reflect on something else – the word “Hosanna”. I want to talk about this word today because during my research, I came across a common thread regarding the word “Hosanna” that I had never thought about before.

 

When you hear the word “hosanna”, where does your mind go? How does it make you feel?

 

I always heard “hosanna” as a cry of celebration. As in, “Hurray! Jesus is here!” The crowd is celebrating the arrival of a celebrity.

 

But, it seems, that might not be the case.

 

Scholars' best guess is that "Hosanna" is a contraction of two Hebrew terms: yaw-shah, meaning “to save” or “deliver”, and naw, meaning “to beseech” or “pray”. In Greek, it translates to soson dei, meaning “save us”. In casual conversation, you could think of it like “God help us”.

 

Now go back and picture Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. At face value it would seem that the Jerusalem fan parade is glorifying God’s name, but they are not really. They are crying out for help, to be saved.

 

The people cheered. They tossed branches from the nearby trees to the ground, and they called out, "Hosanna."  They looked upon this prophet - rumored to be the Messiah - and they cried out to him, "Save us."

 

“God, help us!”

 

These are the cries the crowd makes as Jesus triumphantly enters Jerusalem.

 

Isn’t that the most basic of all our prayers? “God, help us! God, save us!”

 

Over the last decade or two, Palm Sunday worship seems to be pushed aside. Not that we don’t bring palms to church each year, wave them during the procession, and have them blessed so that they can be made into crosses, and subsequently into ashes the following year, but often today’s scripture lessons would lean more towards the Passion than the palms.

 

It is thought that as fewer people attended daily Holy Week services, especially Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, it became important to ensure that congregations, at the very least, heard the story of Jesus’ journey to his death on the cross before hearing of his resurrection on Easter Sunday.

 

Therefore, Palm and Passion stories got merged into a single liturgical Sunday.

 

I understand that reasoning completely. If we move directly from a Palm Sunday procession to an Easter parade, we will have missed the story and experience of the passion.

 

As insufferable and horrific that the events at the end of Holy Week are, we need to slow ourselves down and let the story play out throughout the week. We shouldn’t rush through the Passion just to get to the celebration.

 

We need to experience each as it happened, not try to squish it all into a single Sunday morning.

 

And so our journey starts today with that primal prayer – God save us.

 

The crowd was asking to be saved from the Romans. They wanted deliverance from an occupying army. They wanted to be saved by the Messiah that they had been promised.

 

Now, we’re not under the thumb of a Roman army, but I’m sure I can’t be the only one whose prayer includes some form of “God save us, God save me?”

 

It is a complicated thing to ask, "What does God save us from?"

 

When we wave our palms and boldly cry out, "Hosanna," do we dare imagine what we really want God to save us from?

 

Anger, depression, death?

 

The endless stream of violence?

 

Loneliness?

 

Fear?

 

When we cry out “Hosanna”, we are appealing to God from the most vulnerable places inside of us. We are asking God to make us whole again.

 

Ah! And now we come back to the crowd who changed their mind by the end of the week.

 

The people wanted salvation, which they defined as "freedom from the Romans."

 

"Save us," they cried, but then Jesus did not set about saving them in a manner that they could recognize.  He did not take up a sword and send the Romans fleeing.

 

Instead, he went and had supper with his friends; he went and prayed in a garden.

 

It only took a few days for the crowds to switch from crying "Hosanna" to the shouts of "Crucify him" as they lost their patience waiting for what they expected to happen upon the arrival of the Messiah.

 

We, the reader, are dismayed at this, but would we have acted any differently? If the change we so desperately desired was not happening in the way we expected, would we not get angry?

 

God answers our cries of "Hosanna" in ways so utterly unexpected.

 

God comes. God incarnates. God marches on to death in order to bring us salvation.

 

Is there any better way to commence Holy Week than with "Hosannas" on our lips?

 

Is there any more faithful way to embark on this sacred journey than to ask God, out of the deep, honest places inside of us, to "Save us... please, save us"?

 

As we head into the dark days of Holy Week, anticipating the gruesome events of Good Friday, let us not hide from those horrific events.

 

Cry out “Hosanna” today and then experience deeply God saving us through Jesus through each day and each event of this journey.

 

Hosanna. Soson dei. God help us.