“Hosanna!” can be sung in joy: “Hurray! Oh my God, thank you! Thank you, Jesus! Hosanna, you saved me!” This is cry of joy, of gratitude, of relief that comes when we find that we are free from something that’s burdened us in a profound way, that’s caged in our soul; a fear or a fog has lifted and the world has color again, we feel alive again, full and fulfilled as God created us to be.

When we sing “Hosanna!” on Palm Sunday, it can have that Joy. Through Christ we have found freedom, relief, deliverance, salvation.

“Hosanna!” can also be a cry of desperation.  It means “Save us! Deliver us! Help!” as well as it can mean, “Hurray! Here comes our Liberator!”

As Christians, we join with the ancient cry of “Hosanna!” when we witness Jesus, as a profession of our faith in Jesus as the Holy Savior, as the Embodiment of God’s Liberation … from what?

Now, there’s a lot I can say about this “what?”, this “Jesus saves us … from what?” But it all may not hit home unless we all first feel in our bones the song and the cry of our “Hosanna!”:

The “Hosanna!” we sing out of our truest joy, the “Hosanna!” of our souls when they have come alive …

As well as the “Hosanna!” of our deepest, most desperate yearning, our raw cry to heaven for help.

When we feel these “Hosannas” in our bones, this can help us to understand a little more the “from what?” of the salvation, the liberation that is given to us through Christ. Because the answer is at a deep soul, level, the level of our very being, the level of our being that we feel in a visceral way in those moments when we feel utter fulfillment or utter despair. Because the answer is that Christ offers deliverance from nothing less than the prison of, you could say, the shadow side of the human condition.

This is my attempt to put words to what really in this life life we can at best see through a glass darkly what will be more fully revealed when our souls return to God. The meaning of salvation is something that we grow in understanding as we live and learn and suffer and find new life through our lives of faith in God.

 “Jesus saves us from sin,” right?

This has been said so many times, I want to help us come at it fresh, trying to understand it by looking to the teachings and example of Jesus and to the examples of the wisest saints and great ancestors of our faith.

What I want to make clear is that “sin” does not merely mean that there are a bunch of arbitrary and impossible rules that we continue to fail to live up to and this shows how bad we are.   

Rather, “sin” is much more profound than that. It is much more, I want to say at an existential level, at the level of our very beings in this world. It is a way of diagnosing the pain of our imprisonment in the shadow side of the human condition, and showing that there is a way out, by the Grace of God.

 It’s like when a kid is growing up in an abusive family and they visit their friend’s house for supper and experience for the first time a loving and supportive and good-humored home, and they realize, “Oh my God, I didn’t know this was possible! Could it be that it doesn’t have to be so bad?” At the end of the day, they have to go back home, tragically, but a window has been opened.

You see? That’s the kind of “Hosanna” we’re talking about here. “Oh my God, it doesn’t have to be this way.”

That’s the kind of thing Christ can do for us, and for all humanity. Jesus exposes the pain of our condition, due to human alienation from the true nature of God and the true nature of ourselves. At the same time as he opens a window to the way out, letting in the fresh air and light of the unconditional, universal love of our Holy Creator that can set us free.

In the story of Holy Week, which we remember this week, Jesus exposes sin in a way that is unbearably stark. He becomes the innocent victim of human sin, the shadow side of human nature comes roaring out against him. Jesus, remember, said, “That which you do to the least of these, you do to me.” He embodied this so fully that he took upon himself the atrocities that human beings can commit. Jesus became a scapegoat, like countless others before and since and to this this day, an innocent victim of the abiding tendency in humans to think we can somehow purify ourselves and our society of our sins by expelling and extinguishing certain people who somehow embody those sins.

“The bad things we hate and fear will go away, it’ll all be better, if only we can get rid of this kind of person or that kind of person.” So often, it’s “the least of these,” right?

Scapegoating is so common we often aren’t aware of it, how we participate in this shadow side of human nature, and benefit from it, until it happens to us or to those we care about or sympathize with. Whenever we do feel the pain of this in our lives and in our world, whenever we recognize the innocence that it violates, we cry out “Hosanna!” “Help! Save us!”

In this way, in in so many other ways throughout his life, culminating in his last week, Jesus exposes the naked wrongness of human sin. Scapegoating is but one of the many tortured knots of what sin can do to us, both as individuals and as societies.

Jesus shows that it does not have to be this way; and he shows the way out, through Love.

The way out is to realize the Grace of God’s universal, unconditional Love: God loves each of us, loves all of humanity, even at our worst. Nothing we can do can annihilate that love. It is continuously being resurrected. This is the truth that can set us free.

When we realize this the “Hosannas” of our desperation turn into the “Hosannas” of joy and relief, release and liberation of the heart.

I want to end by sharing with you a passage that expresses all this in yet one more way, to help us recognize the reality of it. This is from Richard Rohr’s book, “The Universal Christ” (pp. 157-158):

“You alone, Christ Jesus, refuse to be a crucifier, even at the cost of being crucified. You never play the victim or call for any vengeance, but only breathe a universal forgiveness upon the universe from this crucified place – your upside-down throne.

We humans so often hate ourselves, but we mistakenly kill you and others instead….

Now you invite me out of this endless cycle of illusion and violence toward myself and toward anybody else…

 “I thank you, Brother Jesus, for becoming a human being and walking the full journey with me. Now I do not have to pretend that I am God…

I thank you for becoming finite and limited, so I do not nave to pretend that I am infinite or limitless.

I thank you for becoming small and inferior, so I do not have to pretend that I am big and superior to anybody.

I thank you for holding our shame and nakedness so boldly and so publicly, so I do not need to hide or deny our human reality.

I thank you for accepting exclusion and expulsion, being crucified “outside the walls” and allowing me to know that I will meet you exactly there.

I think you for “becoming sin,” so I do not need to deny my own failures, and can recognize that even my mistakes are the truest and most surprising path to love.

I thank you for becoming weak, so I do not have to pretend to be strong

I think you for being willing to be considered imperfect, wrong, and strange, so I do not have to be perfect or right, or idealize the so-called normal.

I thank you for not being loved or liked by so many, so I do not have to try so hard to be loved and liked by anybody.

I thank you for being considered a failure, so I do not have to pretend or even try to be a “success.”

I thank you for allowing yourself to be considered wrong by the standards of both state and religion, so I do not have to be right anywhere.

I thank you for being poor in every way, so I do not have to seek being rich in any way.

I thank you Brother, Jesus, for being all of the things that humanity despises and fears, so I can fully accept myself- and everyone else – in and through you.”

Thanks be to God.

(Delivered Sunday, April 13, 2025, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge. )