Meditations from Zion

John 12:12b-13a
…when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, took branches of palm trees and went out to meet Him, and cried out: “ Hosanna! … ”

Hosanna means “save us.” But unfortunately, the crowds who cried, “save us!” at the triumphal entry of Jesus in Jerusalem (now marked as Palm Sunday) did not particularly like his methods. In fact, by the time Passover had arrived, they realized he was not going to overthrow the Roman occupation in the way they expected. In fact, he was unwilling to declare his sovereignty over Israel at all.

I think Judas Iscariot suffered from the same disappointment. He had his own “mental model” of how things should go and finally, decided to take things into his own hands. Perhaps he believed that Jesus, once forced by the Sanhedrin to declare himself, would establish his kingdom. (This is just a personal interpretation of the Judas story.) In any case, Judas’s way changed the course of history.

But don’t both of these cases, the crowds of Jerusalem and Judas, mirror our own efforts to control the outcomes our circumstances? In prayer, we cry out for help, but when help comes, we don’t like it or worse, don’t recognize it (like the story of a man stranded on a roof in a flood and prayed for rescue but did not recognize God in the rowboat of a neighbor or the motorboat and helicopter of strangers–he drowned, by the way).

I think God is in the prayer answering business. All prayer is answered: we must learn to accept the answers. When we say God hasn’t answered our prayers, what we often mean is that God hasn’t answered us immediately and miraculously.

We sometimes err in thinking that the phrase “Your will be done … ” means that God can choose either to answer our prayers or not. But I really think it is just a reminder that we acknowledge and accept His answers because they will always be within His will. These are the only answers we should be interested in receiving.