Augustine Sokolovski
Who are all these people standing on the Lord's path to Jerusalem, greeting Him with "Hosanna in the highest"? They are witnesses of His blessings.
They are all those whom He has healed. They are the blind man at the pool near the Sheep Gate. They are the paralytic. They are also the widow of Nain, with her son, who had died and is now alive, healthy, and happy. He is one of those children whose mouth, according to the prophecy of the Psalms, praises the Lord. They are the man born blind who now sees. They are the demon-possessed, and not just one, but several demon-possessed men whom the Lord has healed: among them is the one in whom a host of demons lived. They tortured him; they were extremely merciless and wicked. But it was only when he saw them throw themselves off the cliff into the abyss and kill the pigs that he saw with his own eyes how terribly destructive they were.
All these people have gathered to make their pilgrimage to Jerusalem and now await their Benefactor, knowing that He is the Messiah coming to the Holy City to reign.
Thus, we, who are gathered in the church on this day, greet the Lord Jesus as witnesses to the blessings He has bestowed upon us. The Church is a society of believers that wanders through history as Jesus himself once did during his earthly life.
We are witnesses to the Lord's blessings, the most important of which is faith. Faith is not the fruit of personal, human effort, but a marvelous, inexplicable, and causeless gift. Each of us has received faith in completely different circumstances, but always, in fact, as a gift freely given, that is, as grace.
Some learned the faith from their loved ones, while others, still children, borrowed this faith from the Church to later pass it on to other children. After all, this is precisely why children can and should be baptized. Some came to Christ as adults, others discovered Him through disbelief, and still others converted from other religions. Many come from agnosticism—that new, truly universal dimension of Christianity, which, like much of the postmodern era, combines the promising openness and the solitary closure of modern man's solitude.
We stand with palm branches, as people once stood to greet the Lord at the entrance and around the Holy City. There is much symbolism in palm branches.
One of these symbols was very important during the earthly life of Jesus Christ. After all, the palm branch was then the banner of Israel's independence from the domination of the Roman Empire. The palm branch was a flag and a very clear sign signifying determination to resist pagan domination. It was a sign of biblical courage.
We must not accuse those who then greeted the Lord of political passion, as many commentators on Scripture often do. The biblical concept of the Messiah has always contained a political dimension. There was no division between the religious and the secular, between the spiritual and the political, in ancient Israel.
It was Christianity that brought a new definition to the concept of religion. It was once believed that religion was a way of connecting the human and the divine. But from the perspective of the New Testament, a truly religious person is one who is able to make divisions correctly. "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's," Jesus himself says in the Gospel. From the perspective of the New Testament, politics is communication between individuals, a matter of choice, and ultimately, the highest form of love for one's neighbor.
We who live in this world today, living this unique life that the Lord has given us and offers us, stand with palm branches and sing: "Now the grace of the Holy Spirit has gathered us together. We have taken up your Cross and proclaim: Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." Besides the troparion, this short stichera is the key hymn of the feast in the Orthodox liturgy of the Palm Sunday.
It should be noted that, contrary to traditional Latin practice, the Entry of the Lord into Jerusalem in Orthodoxy does not have a sad nature and does not belong to Holy Week. This is very important because it helps us better understand the true biblical dimension of this messianic triumph in the liturgical feast.
"We have taken up Your Cross and we say Hosanna!" Indeed, the palm branch, or any other branch on this day, is a symbol of the Cross and of Christ Himself. The faith of the Church says that He, the new man, without sin and the second Adam, as Paul called the Lord, did not have to die.
Let us recall the fig tree cursed by the Lord in the Gospel. Jesus took upon Himself the sin of the world and fell into the sleep of death for our awakening. This was entirely voluntary.
This is why the fig tree in the Gospel was not yet supposed to bear fruit. But it was cursed as a prophecy of the Cross of the Lord. The fig tree was cursed in the image of the Cross and of Christ himself, who took on our curse and all our misfortunes to free us from them.
We hold branches in our hands and, like the children and all those who, almost two thousand years ago, greeted Christ, we also proclaim our independence. We are independent of Hell and Death; we acquired this freedom through the gift of grace, in baptism and communion, in the great Mysteries of Christ. We have renounced Hell and Death, but woe to us if this renunciation is only lip service. But we trust in grace. In accordance with the teaching of the ancient Fathers of the Church, we ask God for the gift of Perseverance.
In our churches, on this feast day of the Entry of the Lord, we await His Second Glorious Coming, when the New Jerusalem will descend from Heaven. Thus, will the story of the world's redemption be fulfilled. It thus proves that the Lord's Entry into Jerusalem is a celebration of the future. It is an eschatological celebration.
God is the future of humanity. Hosanna! This is what the Orthodox Church proclaims today. Blessed is Jesus, who returns in the name of God.