Save us

I have blog posts and journal entries welling up within me, but I’ve been too busy and some of the processing is too difficult to be expressed on paper yet.  A friend I knew in Ethiopia recently started a blog, and she aptly noted that there were, in fact, interesting things to write and contemplate about life here.  Maybe the posts won’t be about being run over by donkeys on the way to the office or the struggle to know what it means to “Give to him who is hungry” while you pass a hundred beggars; but still, life is full and rich and hard and confusing here in the West, and it’s worth acknowledging the good and the bad and the downright funny (Pandora just gave me a blast from my past, when I was infatuated with SANDI PATTY!!!!  yeah, I hit skip!).

Yesterday we read the familiar Palm Sunday passage describing Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem.  I had never realized that the Hebrew meaning of “Hosanna” is literally, “Save us!”  I’m grateful for my time out of the West, partly because I can see the images of these passages a little more clearly.  The crowds lining the road leading into Jerusalem weren’t the happy, festive, well-dressed crowds you see televised from the Macy’s Day parade.  No, they were poor and perhaps a little desperate, confused about this man, yet excited about the possibilities.   They were dressed in everything from robes to tatters, thronging into the street, crescendoing their voices in words few fully understood: “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the LORD! Hosanna in the highest!”  They knew, too, that they needed help, salvation–yet most did not understand that what they really needed was life through death.  Just a few days later the same restless crowd would be incited to cry out, “Crucify Him!”

What Thou, my Lord, hast suffered,
Was all for sinners’ gain;
Mine, mine was the transgression,
But Thine the deadly pain.
Lo, here I fall, my Savior!
’Tis I deserve Thy place;
Look on me with Thy favor,
Vouchsafe me to Thy grace.

–Bernard of Clairvaux