Hosanna means “save now.” And this time of year, a lot of us feel that kind of desperation. Most of us know what it means to feel trapped, alone… hopeless.
That’s a very hard place to be. If you’re there now, remember: throughout the Bible, it is in those spots where God seems to show up most decisively. In Egypt, when His people cried out for a deliverer, He came. When Goliath mocked and intimidated God’s people… He showed up. And when the Romans and a corrupt priesthood had reduced the nation to slavery once more, and His people cried out “Hosanna! Save us now!” He came.
Advent is by design a season of waiting.
But not everyone can wait…Advent can be celebrated only by those whose souls give them no peace, who know who know that they are poor and incomplete, and who sense something of the greatness that is supposed to come, before which they can only bow in humble timidity, waiting until he inclines himself towards us – the Holy One himself, God in the child in the manger. God is coming; the Lord Jesus is coming; Christmas is coming. Rejoice, O Christendom!
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Bonhoeffer knew something about waiting, spending years in a Nazi prison during WWII.
Do you need God to show up? Don’t give up hope! This is the message of Christmas: the Sovereign God who spoke the Universe into being and who holds it all together even while it seems like everything wants tear itself apart – He has come to save, to deliver. He snuck in the back door, in a barn out in the sticks. But does it matter how He got here? God has come to save those who need saving.
Do you need to be saved?
Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
– Mark 2:17
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