Books by NZ Christian Writers

I Don’t Think It Means What You Think It Means: A series on the words we thought we knew

by Tom Hartley

EXCERPT — from “Hosanna: The Word That Was Never a Cheer”

There is a word Christians sing every year on the Sunday before Easter, and almost none of them know what they are actually saying. We sing it with children waving palm branches and the organ swelling and the whole congregation on its feet, and we take it for a word of welcome, a word of praise, a word of triumph — something like Hooray for God, or Praise the Lord, or Welcome to the King. Every one of those is wrong.

The word is hosanna.

And it doesn’t mean what you think it means. It was never a cheer. It is a scream for rescue.

In the Gospels it appears as hosanna, a straight transliteration of the Hebrew hoshia-na, and that phrase occurs exactly once in the whole Old Testament — in Psalm 118:25 — and it is not a shout of celebration. It is the sound of a people who have run out of options. Save now, I beseech thee, O LORD. The verb yasha means to save, to deliver, to rescue from mortal danger; and the little particle na is not a polite please. It is the kind of please you say when the water is over your head, and you cannot see the shore. Hoshia-na is not praise to a king. It is, save us now, or we die.

And this is the word the crowd shouted at Jesus as He rode into Jerusalem. They did not invent it; they inherited it from the Passover. Every Jewish adult in that crowd had recited Psalm 118 all their lives as part of the Hallel, the songs of the Passover meal. And they did not reach for palm branches by accident. A century and a half earlier the Maccabees had entered Jerusalem waving palm branches after driving out the tyrant and cleansing the temple; the palm branch was not a generic symbol of celebration but a specifically political symbol of national deliverance. When the crowd took up palms to meet Jesus, they were not making a theological statement about the Messiah. They were making a political demand about what they expected Him to do.