The word “hosanna” carries more weight than most modern worshippers realize. It began as a raw cry to God from Psalm 118, a plea for safety in a time of danger. But over the centuries it became something else entirely, a shout directed at kings, a call for salvation from earthly power.
On Palm Sunday, when the crowds lined the streets of Jerusalem and turned that cry toward Jesus, they were doing something radical. They were declaring that the emperor in Rome, the so-called prince of peace presiding over his Pax Romana, was not their savior. They were choosing a different king, and that choice would cost Jesus his life within five days.
What the people lining those Jerusalem streets understood, and what Tiberius could never grasp from his palace a thousand miles away, was that peace imposed from a throne does not feel like peace to the people living under its weight. Roman peace had brought crushing taxation, soldiers marching through towns, and men, women, and sometimes children hung on crosses as examples of what happens when you resist.
You are invited to reckon with the reality that the empire has always dressed its violence in the language of righteousness and salvation. The tendency to spiritualize Jesus obscures the fact that he was not parading through Jerusalem to become a spiritual leader. He was acting like a king in a system that tolerated only one, and that is precisely why he was crucified.
“They were crying out hosanna as a way to ask Jesus for a transformation of their circumstances. They were crying out hosanna as a call for their own security and for the safety of their children, for freedom from empire’s grip and from the possibility of living free from the violence of Roman swords and Roman crosses and the so-called Roman peace that had terrorized their lives.”
This Palm Sunday sermon calls you forward into the hardest week of the Christian calendar with your eyes wide open. The parade gives way to betrayal, the shouts give way to silence, and the empire shows once more how willing it is to deal in death. Yet the promise remains. You will wait in the presence of the worst that power can do, and you will be there when the sun rises again, when the power of life over death is reaffirmed.
At First Plymouth, that ancient cry of Hosanna is not a relic. It is a living prayer for wholeness, for well-being, for a world where salvation means something more than a creed to memorize.
