Taylor Mertins

Hosanna. I’ve always loved that word. It’s such a churchy word. And, every Palm Sunday, we reach into the vault of churchy words, we dust off this old familiar declaration, and we proudly put it on display. We shout it in our hymns, we put the word on the lips of our children, we hear it read in the scriptures. And then, at the conclusion of worship, we wrap it up and place it back into the church vault with our other special words only to come back one year from now.

We are familiar with this word. It conjures memories and songs. Churches everywhere will join us in our shouts of Hosanna today.

But do we know what it means?

Our world is built on the assumption that whatever ails us can be fixed by us. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It is good and right for us to dig deep into our wallets and purses to help those in need. We do have an obligation to love our neighbors and our enemies as ourselves. We need to believe in a better world. We need hope.

But we aren’t the hope of the world. If we were then we would not longer need newspapers to tell us what’s wrong in the world because there wouldn’t be anything wrong in the world.

Transcendent hope, real hope for things not yet seen, can’t come from us, it has to be done to us. And that kind of hope has a name: Jesus.

Contrary to how we might often imagine it, the whole ministry of the Lord isn’t about the importance of our religious observances, or our spiritual proclivities, or even our bumbling moral claims. It’s about God having a good time and just dying, literally, to share it with us.

We are all fruitless fig trees standing alone in the middle of God’s vineyard.

We are doing nothing and we deserve nothing.

And yet (!) Jesus looks at our barren limbs, all of our fruitless works, and he says the three words we deserve not at all: “Lord, forgive them.”

Grace, what we talk about all the time, isn’t so amazing unless there’s a reason for it. Put another way - the law of God is given in order that grace might be sought, and the grace of God is given in order that the law might be fulfilled.

We need rejection and election.

We need law and gospel.

Because that’s what life is like.

Karl Barth put it this way: “There is no light which does not also know darkness, no joy which does not have within it sorrow; but the converse is also true; no fear, no rage, which does not have, far or near, peace at its side. No laughter without tears, no weeping without laughter!”

Even John Wesley once said that every law contains a hidden promise.

Grace abounds!

Notice: the things the devil offers to the Lord, they’re all objectively good things - bread, political power, miracles.

And yet, Jesus refused them. And he even used scripture to defend his refusals!

Perhaps if the devil offered Jesus an unending buffet at the golden corral, or the nuclear codes, or David Copperfield’s assortment of illusions, we could sympathize with Jesus’ dismissals. But the devil offered Jesus possibilities for transformation and Jesus said, “No, thank you.”

But here’s the real kicker, the truly wild part of this story: by the end of the Gospel Jesus will, in fact, do all of the things that the devil suggests...

We can’t fix ourselves. In any other place and in an other institution and around any other people that is unmitigated bad news. But here, in the church, it’s nothing but Good News. It’s good news because nobody, not the devil, not the world, not even ourselves can take us away from the Love that refuses to let us go.

The voice from the cloud commands us to listen to Jesus.

But, and it's a big but, if we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t want to listen to Jesus. We’d rather listen to ourselves.

We’d rather listen to ourselves because we are downright addicted to control. Or, at least to thinking we’re in control.

And yet, do you know how God responds to those who think they’re in control?

Laughter.

It is humbling to be laughed at by anyone, but when God’s laughs at us it’s another thing entirely. But perhaps we need to hear that laughter, particularly when we wake and sleep believing that it’s up to us to make the world turn out right.

The world has already turned out right. We know the future in the present. The tomb is empty!

We don’t have to be the hope of the world because Jesus already is. The only thing we have to do is live accordingly.

Prayer is, and must be, more than bringing our wish lists to Jesus, asking him for occasional help when our bodies are no longer functioning the way they are supposed to.

Prayer, instead, is the risky attempt to let Jesus speak.

I can’t prove the resurrection. No one can.

"Believe this," "Believe that," we say in the church. And somehow the genuine character of one’s belief has become the litmus test for Christianity. Which is made all the more strange when we consider the amount of doubt right smack dab in the Bible!

My former professor Stanley Hauerwas puts it this way: “What a lost people we must be to think that God really cares whether we believe in Him or not.”