Palm Sunday - Hosanna: Lord, save us!

Psalm 118; John 12: 12-16

I have had reason to do some hospital visiting over the last few weeks.

And twice now I have had the experience of someone other than the person I’ve gone to visit asking me to pray with or for them. It’s no surprise, really, is it, being in hospital makes us feel especially vulnerable, and I don’t mind anyone, spotting the dog collar, asking me for a prayer. It is a privilege sometimes to be the right person in the right place at the right time, to offer words which will reassure someone that God has not forgotten them, that they are loved and cared for – that God’s love surrounds them.

I don’t think it’s only in hospital that sometimes we want to pray ‘God save us/ God help me/ send your loving Spirit’.

 

Just for a moment, I invite you to think about what you want to be saved from: what your deepest need is that you would like to bring to God today.. 

You don’t need to tell anyone, just take a deep breath & offer to God your own need.

 

You might be praying to be saved from

Despair about climate change…the state of the world.. starvation in Gaza

Closer to home – advancing years… illness…grief…fears for our families and friends.

 

From despair.. God save us

From fear.. God save us.

From pain.. God save us

From all that oppresses us.. God save us.

We are only human, we need God’s help. And we sometimes need to be reminded that God’s saving grace is present with us.

 

We read together some of the words of Psalm 118 (R&S 724 – read antiphonally) about God’s rescue from death.

The Psalm begins and ends with “Give thanks to the Lord for he is good – his mercy endures forever’. The Psalmist declares that this is the God who is with us in all the things that oppress us or weigh us down – in all our fears, through all our perils – God is there and God will rescue us.

I love those powerful words in that psalm

“I shall not die, but live and declare the works of the Lord”.

God is here to rescue us from death, and the fear of death, and all that makes life feel diminished and difficult.

 

This psalm also contains the imagine of the rejected stone becoming the corner stone, the most important stone of all. We don’t know what the psalmist was originally thinking about. 

Something or someone unexpected would become the means of people knowing that God is with them. This is how God works, through people who might not look like much in the world’s sight becoming God’s means of working in the world. 

 

At the final Lent lunch last Thursday I was talking about the wonderful, Desmond Tutu. His early years, in 1930s Apartheid South Africa, were difficult and unremarkable.

Born in a black township to a modest family – his father was a teacher and his mother a domestic servant; he had two brothers who died in infancy. He was sickly as a child – small, his hand affected by polio, he contracted TB aged 16 and was hospitalised for 18 months. He passed the exams to go to college for medical training but the family couldn’t afford his study fees, and so he decided to become a teacher – and then a priest.

And yet this remarkable servant of God came to be loved and admired across the world for his work to end apartheid and to bring peace and reconciliation to the new South Africa.

God may not use the people we expect, in the way in which we expect, but his mercy endures forever and God saves us all the same.

 

So it is in Psalm 118 that we find the cry of “Hosanna”  - the urging of God ‘save us, please’.

When we most need God we can cry out for help to God, who is our saviour, even if that saving power might come in ways we do not expect.

 

John’s gospel gives us his account of what we call Palm Sunday. The need for salvation would have been very much in the minds of the people in Jerusalem.

They had gathered for Passover, to remember the God who set them free. If you stopped people in the street as Jesus and his followers entered the city, and asked them the question we were thinking about at the start of this sermon ‘what do you want to be saved from?’. I think they would have said ‘Save us from Romans! We need God’s help because we are oppressed, we face violence, cruelty, hard taxation, and lack of freedom. 

The people would have been ready to cry ‘Hosanna’, to plead with God “save us”.

 

But the crowd surrounding Jesus may have expected and hoped for something different. They may well have hoped for a warrior-Messiah, sent by God to help to defeat the Romans. There had been rebellions and uprisings before: surely God could send his prophet to inspire and rally the people so they could fight for their freedom.

 

But God once again sends an unexpected helper – like the rejected stone which becomes the cornerstone, like little Desmond Tutu who brought joy and peace, Jesus, from the unremarkable village of Nazareth, enters the city of Jerusalem to cries of ‘Hosanna’ – God save us – and sets about the act of salvation God promises.

 

But instead of fighting the Roman forces, or organising insurrections, Jesus calmly allows himself to be betrayed and captured, tried unjustly and then crucified by the Roman soldiers.

How does Jesus’ capture and death beat the force of Rome? It seems a strange fight-back.

But by his peaceful humility Jesus shows that military might and occupation and cruelty doesn’t have the last word.

 

The crowds in Jerusalem shouting ‘hosanna’ could not have imagined just how that salvation would come about. But we enter this Hoy Week, with all our needs and hopes and desperation.. knowing that this king on a donkey will be crucified on Friday but will rise again, to eternal life on Sunday.

 

And so we take a Palm branch  - like those waved for Jesus in triumphant expectation – and we shape it into a cross. God will save us, through the self-offering of Jesus on the cross.

God hears our cry of ‘hosanna’ – save us! – and offers us peace through the cross, hope after the pain, life which is greater than death.

 

And so as I give out these palm crosses, remember that God will save you – from despair, fear, pain, oppression – whatever afflicts you – God will save you.

 

In the name of the living Jesus. Amen.

 

Give a palm cross to each person with the words 

‘God will save you’.