Together on the Journey:
A Weekly Blog
This Sunday is Palm Sunday, the day where we mark Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem.
But this happy day has a palpable tension running underneath it, and it all begins with the word ‘hosanna’.
When I think of this word ‘hosanna’ what I often think of it is that scene from Jesus Christ Superstar where all the people wave palms and sing as Jesus enters Jerusalem. It starts out as a song of joy, but quickly turns into something more dark when the crowd asks for increasingly difficult things from Jesus. First, the crowd asks Jesus to smile at them before saying how much they like him. Then they ask Jesus to fight for them before finally asking Jesus to die for them. It starts with joy and ends with death.
And it all comes back to that word, ‘hosanna’.
We often assume the word is an act of praise, a sort of ‘hooray, yay for Jesus’ kinda word. But in fact, the word ‘hosanna’ is a Hebrew-derived word meaning ‘save, I beg you’ or ‘please deliver us’. It is not a shout of joy but a desperate plea for help. The crowd, when shouting ‘hosanna’, are asking Jesus to help them by saving them from their Roman oppressors. When we understand the meaning of the word, it’s easy to see why the tension is there, and it’s a tension that we will also be walking with this coming week.
Because this Sunday is not only Palm Sunday, but the beginning of Holy Week, where we walk with Jesus, almost in real time, on his journey from his entry into Jerusalem all the way to his resurrection. In between we will be guests at the last supper and witnesses at his trial. We will be present at the foot of the cross, we will mourn with the disciples, and we will discover the empty tomb with Mary.
And while it makes sense to want to jump right from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, I invite you to hold space this week for everything in between. If you’d like to hold that space with the community here at St. George’s, please check out our full Holy Week offerings here: https://stgeorgesonthehill.ca/holy-week/
If you’ve never seen Jesus Christ Superstar, I highly recommend the movie version from 1973. If you want to have a look at the scene I am talking about above (Hosanna), you can watch that here: