Hosanna

Palm Sunday Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!

The shout of the crowds in Jerusalem was Hosanna, Save us we pray.
The crowds that day had many things they needed to be saved from. There were high taxes, disease, hunger, a high infant mortality rate and a low life expectancy. There was a bitterly divisive religious culture of conflict and condemnation. There was a foreign occupation army of people who worshiped strange deities, spoke a strange language and practiced customs that seemed immoral and embarrassing. There was a low level but persistent insurgency against all authority that lashed out unpredictably at innocent civilians.

There was much the crowd needed salvation from. They saw in Jesus the one who would make it all better. They saw in Jesus the one who would defeat their enemies, provide them food, and impose order on a broken and disordered religious system. The crowd placed all of its frustration and hope on Jesus and greeted him with wild abandon. Save us Jesus. Save us we pray!
The religious and political authorities also heard the shout of the crowd. Where the crowd expressed a desperate hope the authorities reacted with fear.

Some feared that Jesus just might pull it off. He just might overthrow the established order. And, it he did, those who created and maintained that order would lose their position and quite possibly their lives. It was clear that many of Jesus’ followers were ready to take over positions in government and religion. According to the customs of the day there was no easy or peaceful transition of power. More often than not, those who took power destroyed those who lost power.
Some feared that Jesus would not be able to pull it off. The High Priest Caiaphas was among this group. They listened carefully to what Jesus taught. The observed his actions, his miracles, his demeanor. Unlike most of Jesus’ followers and adversaries, this group knew that Jesus was no revolutionary. They knew Jesus was not coming to Jerusalem to kill any one. They knew Jesus wanted to bring peace into the very center of the conflicts that divided the people of Israel
Caiaphas did not fear that Jesus would succeed in his mission. Caiaphas and others like him feared that Jesus would fail. They feared that when he failed there would be chaos. They feared that the Romans would deal with that chaos in the only way Rome knew how to deal with conflict: total annihilation of those who threatened the security of the Empire.

As Jesus entered Jerusalem that day he knew all of these things. He knew how the crowds wanted him to be their new king. He knew the authorities feared he would destroy them. He even knew the priests feared he would fail and that the risk of failure was too high to allow him to live.

It didn’t take divine power for Jesus to discern these hopes and fears in the human heart. They are part of the human condition. They are fundamental to the way we all live our lives from the place of separation: separation from God, from each other, and from the image of divine love imprinted on our souls. A species that lives from the place of separation lives from the place of a deeply rooted transcendent spiritual pain.

That pain produces enormous distortions in the way we think, the way we feel, and the way we make choices. One of the fundamental distortions is the fear that we will not get what we want or what we need. Another distortion is that we, or to be more precise: I, and I alone know what is best. The third major distortion is the formation of a will guided by the principle of "me first". That distortion manifests in a life of rebellion, spit, anxiety and cynicism.

It doesn’t take divine power to discern the problems that define the human condition. It just takes a mind that pays attention to the world as it is.
It does take divine wisdom to discern the root of the problem. Because the root of the problem is that all people choose to maintain separation from God.. And, in that choice we defend our pride, self will and fear by finding someone else or something else to blame.
The three groups of people who witnessed Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem that day had different expectations and reactions. But, they shared the same common problem. They lived from the pain of separation and wanted the quick fix for the symptoms but not the long term healing of their souls.

Jesus knew the solution involved his choice to do what no other human being was willing to do. His choice is revealed to us in his prayer: Father, not my will but Thy will be done.
Jesus never chose separation. He never knew the pain of separation. Yet, he knew the only solution to the great tragedy of humanity was to embrace what we defiantly hold on to even though it leaves us miserable and eventually kills us. Jesus chose to embrace what he never in his life chose to manifest.

Jesus chose to embrace the pain, the distortion and the death of a soul that separates from God. In that choice Jesus brought the love and holiness of God right into the very center of human sin. By doing that, Jesus reunited humanity with divinity and restored to us what we abandoned.
He accomplished this amazing restoration through the divine power of eternal love. And, because he chose to bring love to the place of pain he offers reunification with God as a gift. The offer is not a command. There is no condemnation in the gift. There is no need to earn the gift. There is no body of knowledge we have to acquire first before we can accept the gift.

The gift is free to all. The gift is the love of God reaching out to a lost and lonely and fear filled soul with the words: I am here for you. I have already embraced that terrible pain in your soul that you fear to confront. Receive the gift and find the fulfillment of all of your dreams and desires in a new way of living.
The crowds had shouted out: Hosanna- save us we pray. Jesus answered their prayer. He answered it in a way no one ever expected. He answered it perfectly and fully. He answered it with the infinite love and compassion that embraced sin and death and rose again to bring us eternal life here and now.
That eternal life is not a duration of existence. It is a quality of being we can enjoy now. It comes to us when we, too, however imperfectly and selfishly cry out to God: save us we pray.