Hosanna! Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!

The crowds surging around Jesus as he rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday joyfully echoed the words of Psalm 118:25-26. In the ESV translation, this psalm says, Save us we pray, O Lord… Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! While hosanna has become a cry of praise to God in our time, most scholars agree that it is simply a transliteration of the Hebrew words for save us now, a call for the Messiah to come and redeem Jerusalem. Today, though, how fitting it is that we can cry, Lord save us, we praise you for saving us! in a single word. Hosanna, indeed.

As Christianity’s highest holy day approaches, I have been saturating myself in Scripture and song. It’s been a gift, having enough time and resources to spend so many hours in contemplation and meditation. A hidden danger always looms, though – how much about myself do I really want to know? How strange to be both the person shouting, Hosanna! and the one crying, Crucify! What a contradiction we Christians are. Sinless sinners, willing slaves. Broken yet whole. Human children of the living God.

Things have been tough lately and my coping strategies range from healthy to harmful. My daily Bible study has been my anchor, and music has been water in the barren desert that is bipolar depression. It is a frustrating mystery, though, how I can abide daily in God’s love, sincerely long for a glimpse of his glory, and yet still devise my own ways to dull the pain of earthly life. My love for my Savior is true and when I turn my eyes fully on him, all shadows flee. So, why is it so easy to look away? And how can God heal my brokenness when part of me prefers to cling to the pieces?

This Easter season, the darkness overlying my heart is sloughing off. The clean beauty of tiny wildflowers and the bright green of new leaves now stir my heart to look and marvel. Only a couple weeks ago, so much of me was empty and flat, but now I laugh and hike and pray, stuffing the memory of darkness into a deep corner of my mind. Only, during those months of self-medicating my own aching heart, new sins have clawed their way into my life. They’re not the kind of things I might piously confess at Bible study and they’re not the kind of things I would even write down. Because they’re not the kind of things I’m ready to let go. Hosanna, I cry, Glory to God in the highest! But there’s a whisper that follows, echoing the demons Jesus cast out – What have you to do with me, O Son of God?

We Christians sing year-round about the holiness of God and our own utter depravity, and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that reconciled us all. As Good Friday approaches, I fight to see that the secret sins I cling to as good as form the nails through Christ Jesus’ hands. The demon within me squirms and shrinks back at every Hosanna I cry, but hisses its lies nonetheless – You are already forgiven, what does it matter? Confess, confess, just come back later. You can repent tomorrow….

I am saved, I know this. I do not fear death. But right now, some of the time… I fear life. I am weak, I tell myself, but maybe I just don’t want to be strong. Of all the fragments of song lyrics playing in my head right now, the one I can’t unhear says, I have tried to fall when I could stand. A spotless sinner I am and so often the balance of my contradictions is on the wrong side. The cross, the cross, please help me lay it all at the feet of your cross.