Misunderstood Hosannas--April 6, 2020
"Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting, 'Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!'" [Mark 11:8-10]
Before it was anything else, it was a plea for help. "Hosanna," that is. This word has been preserved by the Gospel writers and then handed down by church folks over the centuries to the point where most of us don't recall its meaning. We know to say it, and we know that it's the Word-of-the-Day for Palm Sunday. But most of us just put it in the pile of Bible-jargon-we-learned-somewhere-along-the-way along with other Hebrew and Aramaic words like, "Alleluia," "Golgotha" (or its Latin parallel, "Calvary,") and names like "Pontius Pilate," "Zion," or "Jehovah." And we add that on top of the other church jargon in our memory banks, like "narthex" and "litany" and "eucharistic" and "fellowship."
But there is something deep going on in the cry, "Hosanna." In fact, it's deeper than even the crowds who first said it when Jesus came into town a week before his execution.
Like I say, the word "Hosanna" comes from a Hebrew expression that means something like, "Save us, please!" It's the sort of thing you pray to God when you are at the end of your rope. Or maybe it's like when you're really in a pinch and your friend agrees to help you--like to get you to the airport in time, or to cover a shift for you, or to spot you some money when you are in need of cash--and you say, before they have even done what they've promised, "You're a lifesaver! Thank you so much!"
"Hosanna" had come to have this feel of hopeful expectation along with the desperate need by the time Jesus comes on the scene. There's a feel of deep and urgent need, but also deep hope that the God to whom we call will come through. Of course, what we think we need to be "saved" or "rescued" from, exactly, is a trickier question. For a lot of folks in the first century, the most they dared to hope for was an end to Rome's rule occupying their homeland. To cry out "Hosanna!" in the days of imperial rule of Judea was to hope for rescue from the brutality of Roman soldiers marching through the streets, torturing their kinfolk to make examples out of them on trumped up charges, and crucifying their neighbors and countrymen. To cry "Hosanna!" was maybe a wistful longing for some "better time" in Israel's past, too--it was a hope for the "good old days" when their nation wasn't overrun by foreign empires and then they had their own fully independent king. And in the minds of a good many Judeans in Jesus' day, it was a word colored by rosy nostalgia about how "great" things had been in some glorious past, you know, back the days of kings like David.
The trouble is, that hope--for some imaginary day in the past when things were "great" if only you could somehow make everything go back to them all over again--was problematic. We humans have this way of misremembering how "great" the past was, and assuming that recreating it will solve all the problems of our present. And so the people who are crying out, "Hosanna!" as Jesus comes into town are precariously close to pinning their expectations on Jesus that he will restore the "good old days" when (at least as they selectively remembered things), their nation was strong, their armies were winning everywhere, their economy was booming, and their rulers were good and peaceful and just.
Well, it is indeed a lovely thing to hope for a day when there is peace and justice and abundance for all... but that's a dangerously inaccurate view even of how things were during the days of the great King David or his successor, King Solomon (the literal "son of David"). David's reign was plagued not only by scandal and bloodshed with foreign enemies, but was marked by an outright civil war of competing claimants to the crown that would put your average episode of "Game of Thrones" to shame. And Solomon, for all of his famous wealth and wisdom, was the architect of a national program to oppress his own people to build vast palaces, treasuries, and a life of royal luxury on the backs of his people's labor.
Compared to the unpleasantness of life under the Romans, maybe all of that was easily swept under the rug. But it's funny how anytime folks start longing for some previous time in history when things were "great," they selectively remember only the parts that were "great" for people like them, and they forget all the folks who weren't included in all that winning. And then when someone comes along that they can pin all of that nostalgically wishful thinking onto and that someone doesn't magically turn back the clock to make things exactly as they were (mis)remembered, the crowd turns on them. And that's what we're seeing here in the story of Holy Week. If you have ever wondered what would possess people to throw their cloaks in the roads or cut down palm branches from the fields to throw in the street as some stranger rode by on a donkey, maybe you need to hear it with all of that pent-up longing in the background. The faces in that crowd are people who have seen one empire after another tromping on their land, their nation, their communities, for as long as they could remember--and for generations further back before that. And at some point, you latch on to any thing, any thing, that you think is making you the promise of restoring some era of better times.
And Jesus, in so many ways, was the unwilling target of everybody's projections. He was doing things that seemed to fly in the face of the established order of Rome, and he seemed completely unafraid of the religious and political so-and-sos. They just assumed that meant he was going to overthrow the Romans, make himself king after a quick and easily-won war (you can sense the delusions already, can't you?), and then, with a wave of a magical messianic hand, he would turn the clocks back a thousand years to the "glory days" of Israel's "greatness" under King David. That's why they make the fuss they do. They are projecting all of that onto this homeless rabbi riding a borrowed burro. And when it turns out that Jesus does not fit those projected expectations, they will turn on him. They will want his death. Indeed, it only takes five days from their "Hosannas" for it to happen.
Now, let's be clear--it's not that Jesus disappoints because he just isn't good enough to make those "good old days" of imagined memory happen again. It's that Jesus has come to make something new... something truly better... and something at odds with both Rome and even old King Solomon's way of doing things. Jesus has come to reign--but not in the sense of replacing one pompous bully tyrant with another new pompous bully tyrant. He has come to save--but not by sending in the cavalry to kill enough centurions to make the rest turn tail and go back to Rome. He has come to rescue, but not by destroying anybody else. He has come, indeed, as the one worthy to receive our "Hosannas," even if we have misunderstood what we needed saving from. Jesus has come as the one who bears the violence of the empire and takes it into himself. He has come as the one who doesn't take up even a single sword to fight off the betrayer and the mob, but who dies for their sakes. He has come as the servant that Israel's kings were always meant to be, but never could actually make themselves become. He is the one who saves and reigns from a cross, not a throne or an armored war horse. And he has come, not to recreate an artificial era from the past that was really only good for SOME people, but to create a new kind of life--the one he kept calling, "the Reign of God," in which there is goodness and enough for all, and where justice and mercy embrace in peace. That's what we most deeply need.
So on this day, we too, can let the word "Hosanna" be called forth from our lips. But we should be clear about these two truths when we speak it: first, people who find themselves chanting "Hosanna," even to Jesus himself, have a way of misunderstanding what we are asking to be saved from and how the saving should look like; and, second is the good news that even when we don't know what we really need to be rescued from or for, Jesus has come to bring us life anyway in spite of ourselves. Jesus will bear our misspoken Hosannas, and he saves us the way we really needed it all along.
Dear Jesus, take our misunderstandings, misconceptions, and mis-remembered nostalgia, and bring us all to the kind of life you see we most deeply need. Save us and reign among us by your cross, regardless of what we expected.
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