They brought the donkey and the colt, placed their cloaks on them,
and Jesus sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the
road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on
the road. The crowds went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,
"Hosanna to the Son of David!"
"Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!"
"Hosanna in the highest!"
-Matthew 21:7-9
The thing that usually (and powerfully) strikes me about this passage is contained in the footnote: "Verse 9 - 'Hosanna' - A Hebrew expression meaning 'Save!' which became an exclamation of praise."
"Hosanna" means "save us," but it is used to praise God because He has saved us.
I particularly think about this in the context of wrestling with sin. I cry out for God to save me, to grant me freedom and victory, yet I can also praise Him because in Christ I have been given freedom and victory already. Now I have to fight to live in the reality of those blessings. And I'm dependent on God's grace to do that, so I can still cry out "Hosanna!" as a plea and as praise.
In fact, maybe our crying out to God is a form of praise in itself. When we come before God recognizing our neediness, we worship Him. When all we have to offer is our brokenness and weakness, and we offer that to God, that is worship. Because He is our All in all. He is our strength, and He makes us whole. So it is entirely fitting that we bring our helplessness to Him - to do so is merely to come before Him honestly.
Yes, we praise God in adoration and thanksgiving, and also in our most desperate pleas.
That is a beautiful truth. Yet, this is not what struck me when I read the story of the triumphal entry this past week. What gave me pause is the fact that the passage doesn't say anything about Jesus' response to the crowd. Was He pleased with what happened? Was He sober-minded as He thought of what was ahead?
I'm certain that most of the Roman-ruled Jews in the crowd didn't really understand what they were saying when they shouted "Hosanna." Most of them probably just wanted to be rescued from the power of their Gentile oppressors. But Jesus knew that he would answer their cries of "save!" in a much more significant way - by rescuing them from the power of their own sin.
I'm also confident that Jesus knew that in a week's time, many, if not all, of the people in that crowd would be screaming "Crucify Him!" as He stood before Pilate. Jesus knew that the people's adoration would turn to scorn, their joy in Him would turn to hatred of Him. He knew that all those people, just like Peter, would utterly betray Him.
Since He knew that - since He knew the fickleness of their hearts - did He still accept their praise as they shouted "Hosanna"?
This is the magnificent beauty and wonder of God's grace - I think He did.
Even when our praise lacks understanding, even when our fickle hearts are bound to turn to lesser things in the next moment, God accepts our praise. That is not to say that we don't strive to have steadfast hearts - to love and serve and worship God in everything, in every moment. But when we fall short of that (and oh! how often we fall short!), He still accepts and enjoys our praise because we praise Him in Jesus' name. In Jesus, all things are redeemed and made pure, even our fickle love and our feeble attempts at worship.
Such is the joy and wonder of God's grace. Not just that God loves me, which is too great a truth to fully understand, but that He accepts and even delights in my deeply imperfect love for Him. And that leads me to love and worship Him all the more.
