😇 Lent 6 (Palms)

Readings: Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29; Matthew 21:1-11

From the TRNG Room:

• How to Read Scripture Like You’re Still in the Field

Central Thesis/Theme:

Palm Sunday is not the triumphant coronation most people imagine — it's a crowd demanding the wrong kind of salvation on their own terms. I want to sit with that discomfort this week, especially as someone who has seen what organized violence actually produces. The people waving palms and shouting "Hosanna" were asking for a military deliverer in the tradition of David, and they used the language of Psalm 118 — a battle psalm — to make that demand. What they got instead was a king riding a donkey, quoting Zechariah, and about to flip tables. Palm Sunday is the hinge between expectation and subversion, and it has everything to do with political theology.

Key Textual/Historical Insights:

"Hosanna" (הוֹשַׁע נָא, hosha na) is not a praise word — it's a military imperative: save us now. The root yasha (salvation) runs through the name Joshua/Yeshua, the prophet Hosea, and Deborah's general Barak, whose name means "blessing" and whose origin in Kadesh Naphtali maps strikingly onto Nazareth in the northern territories. The crowd quoting Psalm 118 would have had verses 14–18 in their ears — a battle scene directly echoing Miriam's Song of the Sea in Exodus 15. Matthew 21 quotes Zechariah 9:9, but the very next verse promises the destruction of war chariots. These were not peaceful, spiritual associations. Every name, every verb, every allusion was drenched in military expectation.

Theological Argument:

The earliest Greek text of Exodus 15:3 does not say "God is a warrior" — it says God crushes war, and tem does it by drowning the oppressor without the victims having to take on that guilt. That distinction matters enormously. When the crowd demands salvation on their terms — by their preferred instrument of violence — they are asking to use the oppressor's tools against the oppressor. But salvation that comes from outside the people themselves, as with Jael (who was not even an Israelite), is the recurring biblical pattern. I think the cross is God's final word on violence as a redemptive instrument. Palm Sunday sets up that argument by showing us what happens when we mistake our expectations for God's agenda.

Contemporary Application:

I came home from war with knowledge people didn't want to deal with — what explosive violence does to a human body, what it costs the person who carries that out. For ten years, people wanted my credibility without the full weight of what I carried. That's Palm Sunday: the crowd wants the victor, not the actual person doing the work. My military experience is not a liability in reading these texts — it's a hermeneutic. I know what it means to want someone to come in and solve the problem by force, and I know why that never resolves the underlying thing. Palm Sunday is for anyone who has ever wanted God to take their side in a fight.

Questions Raised:

• If "Hosanna" is a demand rather than a doxology, how does that reframe the way we enter Holy Week liturgically?

• Does the pattern of salvation-from-outside (Jael, Miriam, the donkey-riding king) rule out any legitimate use of force, or only the particular logic of using the oppressor's tools?

• What does it mean that the lectionary omits Psalm 118:14–18 — the battle stanzas — and is that omission theologically loaded?

• How should communities shaped by military service read Palm Sunday differently than those with no combat exposure?

• If the cross is God's last use of violence for redemption (as I argue here), what does that demand of Christians who still operate within systems of organized force?

Reflection

Welcome to Fighting Words. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from the chapter house in Albany, Oregon.

This morning is Palm Sunday — or "Palms Hyundai," as I like to call it. Our readings today come from Psalm 118 and Matthew 21. It's a very short set of verses that leads us into Holy Week, which is the most important week of the Christian calendar, and there's a lot there.

There's the palm reading, which I've read here, and there's also the passion reading, which I prefer not to read because it feels a little rushed. We'll pick back up at Easter. Palm Sunday is an important one, especially for political theology — if you want to think about what it means that God claims to be active in a world that seems hopelessly corrupt.

Palm Sunday's for you. And you might not like what it's actually about.

I say that as a veteran who fought for my country, who saw the worst of what we tell ourselves we can bear, came back, and for ten years did not want to be listened to. I'm not going to justify myself — it's just true. People did not want to listen. Good-intentioned people wanted my credibility without the full weight of what I had to share after I came home from war. That reminds me a lot of Palm Sunday.

Palm Sunday is when the multitudes want to see Jesus enter Jerusalem as the Son of David. Before we get there, I want to walk through Psalm 118, because that's where we get the word "Hosanna."

"Hosanna" is the anglicized version of the Hebrew hosha na. Now, Heh is the name of Joshua's father — Joshua, son of Nun — before it was changed in Numbers 13. The root yasha means salvation, or to save. It's a verb, and verbs are among the most primitive language forms. Yasha becomes hosha, which becomes definite — "the salvation." Add the divine name Yah, and you get Yehoshua — in English, Joshua. Say it with me: Joshua. Joshua's name literally means "God's salvation."

That is the name they were ringing out.

Hosha means salvation. It's also the root of the prophet Hosea's name. And so you have Joshua son of Nun, Joshua son of Jehozadak, and Joshua son of Mary — all carrying the same name, the same meaning. When the people shout "Hosanna," the na at the end is an imperative: save us now. Give us salvation. Liberty or death. Hosanna means save us already.

And they're not saying it from a place of oppression the way the ancient Israelites cried out before Assyria or Babylon. They're saying it in triumphalist language. They've watched a string of messianic pretenders try to overthrow the Herodian system backed by Rome, and they all failed. More would fail after the Son of Mary. If you look ahead a week to Easter, you might think the Son of Mary failed too — because he died. And they didn't want a loser. They wanted a winner. They wanted a king. Just like in 1 Samuel 8: give us a king. Give us David back. But David was never the point. Kings were never the point.

The first person described by the root hosha — the first savior applied to a human being — was a judge of Israel.

I'll pause and let you guess.

Judges 4. Deborah. The fiery woman was the very first hoshia, the first deliverer. And Barak, her commander — Deborah was like the commander in chief, Barak was the frontline military commander. Barak means "blessing." It comes from the same root as the Hebrew word for "kneel." If you want something, if you need something you don't have, you get on your knees. You want a blessing, you kneel. If you've seen those clasped, upright praying hands — that is not what prayer or blessing looks like in this tradition. Blessing is on your knees. If you want a biblically accurate image of prayer, it's knees on the ground.

And I don't think the crowd was on their knees.

Psalm 118 makes something explicit: they wanted a military commander. Not spiritual warfare, not satyagraha, not nonviolent resistance — they wanted someone to come in and break things. Which means they wanted someone to use the same system that Rome and Herod had used against them. And they used the language of Psalm 118 to make that demand, knowingly, because in the portion the lectionary cuts off — we read verses 1–2 and 19–29, skipping verses 14–18 — there is a battle scene. It opens at verse 14: "The Lord is my strength and my song and has become my salvation." That is a direct quote from Miriam's Song of the Sea in Exodus 15, the moment after the chariots drowned.

Now, was that using the oppressor's system against them? No. It was miraculous. It was outside their control. It wasn't in their self-interest. It was something done to the situation from beyond it.

Apply that same interpretive lens: you've just seen your oppressor drowned at sea by no power of your own, while you're still wearing the tattered rags you dragged out of slavery. Is that the same thing as walking someone up to Herod's temple and proclaiming him Son of David? For some in the crowd, maybe. But not for most.

The Song of the Sea is a direct invocation of military victory — the same kind of victory at work in Judges 4 and 5. Jael, who killed the enemy commander, was not even an Israelite. Salvation comes from outside the people themselves. And whenever the people try to get their salvation on their own terms, they lose.

If you want to see someone flip tables and conclude from that that the oppressor must simply be oppressed in return, there's something coming for you in the story of the Son of Mary.

I also want to note the Barak connection in verse 26. In Hebrew, baruk — "blessed" — appears right there. And if you're a Hebrew speaker, you're hearing a name: Barak, the military commander from Kadesh Naphtali, from the northern tribal territories. Nazareth — or Natzeret in Greek — is also in the north, in the land of Naphtali, in what could be called a holy city. The parallels are not something you construct by reading — they're something you hear, because you've been reciting these texts every week since childhood. You hear verbs in names and names in verbs. Yeshua literally means salvation, so every time someone says his name, they are saying salvation. Barak means blessing, so every time someone says his name, they are saying blessing. These can all be true simultaneously. In God, all things are possible — you can hold two things at once without dropping either of them.

So Palm Sunday is the people asking for the wrong thing, or asking in the wrong way, and getting it briefly. Jesus goes up to Jerusalem, and in Mark he flips the tables after he's already taken a look around. He's not impulsive — he sees people there. We tend to have a gentile imagination about all of this. We want a little distance from the nitty-gritty Hebrew reality.

Matthew 21 quotes Zechariah 9:9: "Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout, daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you — just, and having salvation, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey." If you only read the pixels on the page, you might stop there. But if you've been reciting Zechariah, you know what comes next. Verse 10: "He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall speak peace to the nations." Chariots appear in Exodus 15. Chariots get drowned.

And Exodus 15:3 — this matters. The earliest Greek text, and none of the Dead Sea Scrolls include this exact phrasing — does not say "Yahweh is a warrior." The Hebrew, ish milhamah, does not appear in the earliest manuscripts. What the Greek says is that God crushes war. How does God crush war? By drowning the oppressor without the victims having to take on that guilt.

There is something running through Old Testament violence that keeps insisting: you don't have to do this. You shouldn't have to do this. You should not use your oppressor's tools against your oppressor — because then what are you?

The mistake we make on Palm Sunday is thinking either that God comes in as a war horse — and I think the Johannine apocalyptic literature, taken literally, is missing the point — or that we sanitize all of it and pretend the violence isn't there. The hyperbolic imagery in Revelation is meant to be hyperbolic. The Left Behind series is interesting fiction. But if you think that's what you're supposed to do with apocalyptic literature, you haven't read enough books to recognize hyperbole when you see it.

If you haven't absorbed this material — whether through illiterate oral tradition or literate, ADHD-friendly tradition — you might miss these things. You might think that leaving out the military language is an attempt to erase it. It's not. Everyone in that moment would have heard the violence there. That is precisely why they were shouting hosha na — save us now, on our timetable, by our means, do our bidding, God.

Which is why, a week later, the multitudes are shouting at Pilate, asking for the wrong thing again.

Palm Sunday is possibly the most important Sunday of the year — almost as important as Easter, which is itself almost as important as Good Friday and Holy Saturday, where we see exactly what violence does when God says: fine. You want violence? Here is violence. And it will be the last time violence is used for redemption.

That's what I think. I don't think prophecy is dead. But I do think that violence as a justifiable means of peace is dead. That's what the cross means to me. That's what the logic of organizing and justifying violence means to me.

But what do I know? I haven't seen collective violence firsthand. I haven't carried it out on behalf of other people. I don't know Greek and Hebrew — God forbid I don't have the languages. I don't have a PhD. I'm just some bookseller in rural Oregon trying to figure these things out.

We never fully will. But the more you ask, the more you'll find. And if there's anything I think I've done well, it's that I've been asking questions — questions that seem more pressing to me than some of the ones I was taught to ask. Thank you for asking them with me, or at least for listening to me ask them out loud.

As always, if you have comments, thoughts, or concerns, I'm genuinely interested in hearing from you. I'm an open book — you can find me online. What enables me to engage this material with some confidence is the combination of years in the daily lectionary, two graduate degrees, and my military experience. I learned things through battlefield service that I could not have learned any other way. That is a kind of knowledge we tend to want contained — we don't want to deal with what it looks like to expose a human body to an explosive device. That's a luxury I don't have. I either pretend it never happened, or I carry it with me into every text I interpret, every tradition I've inherited.

I choose to carry it. Because I think that's how we continue to grow — as a society, and as a church.