Sermon: Hosanna... bracketed by Hallelujah (John 12:12-16) / Palm Sunday through Hamnet (2025), March 29, 2026

Sermon: Hosanna… bracketed by Hallelujah

 

Recently, I watched an incredibly moving masterpiece, an Oscar-winning film, Hamnet. Has anyone seen it?

The movie invites us into the story of Shakespeare’s family, his meeting with Agnes, their first daughter Susanna, and the twins, Judith and Hamnet. Agnes’s family, through generations, carries a kind of intuition, women who can sense or see a person’s truest nature and the shape of their life. Agnes, in particular, can gently take a person’s hand and sees what may unfold.

 

Theirs is a sunny life, intertwined with nature. Hamnet deepens around the loss of Agnes and William’s son, based on the death of Shakespeare’s own son. In the author’s narrative, one day Hamnet finds his twin sister Judith lying weakly in bed. Their father has gone to London for his playwriting, and they are living in Stratford with their mother and Shakespeare’s parents. When Agnes returns from working in the garden, Hamnet tells her that Judith is not her usual self.

 

Judith has the plague, a disease with a 70% death rate at the time. Agnes, having once seen in a vision her own deathbed with only two children present, devotes herself entirely to caring for Judith, who had always been weaker than the robust, energetic Hamnet. But that night, Hamnet comes to his sister’s bed, lies beside her holding her hand, and says, “I will be brave, as father said. Judith, I will give you my life. If I lie here like this, let death take me instead of you.”

 

The next morning, when Agnes finds the two children in one bed, Hamnet is already close to the threshold of death. Filled with pain and fear, he calls out to his mother in deep groans and meets his death while his sister Judith lives. And then Shakespeare, the father, arrives too late.

 

Shakespeare returns to London; time passes, and Agnes’ heart is tortured with an unrelenting despair. Agnes hears that Shakespeare is presenting a tragedy, Hamlet. At the time, Hamnet and Hamlet were considered variations of the same name. Was this a play about her beloved, lost son? With a heavy heart, Agnes travels to London with her brother, all the way to the Globe Theatre.

 

I watched Hamnet without knowing anything about what it was about or how it would unfold. Because you also deserve that same freedom, that surprise and joy of discovery, I will not say more.

 

But there, I encountered again the meaning of that famous line from Hamlet, “To be or not to be,” the pain and sorrow, the awareness of self and circumstance, and the raw question of human existence in the moment when the world around us is in ruin and something we hold dear is falling apart.

 

Especially when Hamlet says, “O, I die, Horatio; if thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story.”

 

In his own way, holding the loss of his son Hamnet in his heart differently from Agnes, Shakespeare, by staging this tragedy and inviting Agnes to see it, opens up something for her broken heart and wounded soul.

 

What the author imagines Shakespeare to be opening is a rite of passage for the dead, their son, a way of remembering him rightly and sending him onward to where he belongs. A ritual that had been lost, an opportunity and a space to grieve, to honour, and to make right what could not be completed.

 

It is the forming of a communal rite for the one who has been lost. The community gives the dead their rightful path and time. Through this, the community receives a source of God that allows healing in the present and the strength to move toward the future.

 

Each year, I have the incredible privilege to think about what we commemorate on Palm Sunday. Especially this year, I have been thinking about this, why does Palm Sunday become the beginning of Holy Week? In many ways, it does not make sense. It is not easy to hold together a celebratory parade with exultant palm waving and the impending suffering and pain, the simple joy of the crowd with the dark plotting of those who wished to see Christ dead.

 

The crowds spread their cloaks and palm fronds along the road where Jesus was riding on a donkey, covering the way. Those who were filled with new energy and fresh hope, those who were alive with expectant anticipation of the future, had no idea their hearts would be crushed by what would unfold through Holy Week.

 

And Jesus, even with the vision and inspiration of the path shown by God, as the prophets had handed down, mounted the donkey and moved silently and slowly toward Jerusalem. At that moment, maybe even before the decision of his heart to follow this way, what questions might he have asked? What difficult truth might he have recognized and passed through in the love of God?

 

Within the path shown by the ancient Jewish prophets, what kind of Sophia, a feminine or maternal wisdom of God, nonviolent and deeply present in the rhythm and flow of creation, did Jesus consult? What kind of deep holy mystery did he carry in his heart at this intersection of Palm Sunday and the Holy Week that would follow? What was he groaning? What was he accepting? What was he confronting? How was he, in all of that, brave?

 

Did he, like Hamnet, not know the future that would come upon him? Did he not know setting his face toward Jerusalem would bring him face to face with death? No, he knew. He knew. It’s just as Hamlet, Jesus utters, “I die, Father, my friends, … Tell my story.”

 

To be or not to be, that is the question. This is a famous line from Hamlet, and a Korean Shakespeare scholar once explained that this is not simply asking whether one will continue to exist or accept death, but rather asking, “Is it to remain as it is, or not?”

 

“Is it to remain as it is, or not.” Do I leave things as they are, caught in the forces that shape this age, this world, my life, and my people, and continue to live as I am? Or will I make a choice not to remain as it is?

 

Will I exist differently? Will I choose a completely different power, the power of God’s love and justice, to flow, to bring health to the world and to life, and to quench what is parched?

 

“Is it to be as it is, or not, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them? To die, to sleep, no more.” (Act 3, Scene 1)

 

The question seems to lie here: do we endure the suffering, or do we fight to end the power that crushes life, and how does Jesus respond? Jesus teaches us not to take up arms against the sea of troubles, even if it means our literal or symbolic death. His way, his weapon, is to break and share bread. And to die is not to sleep, or simply the end.

 

The strength of domination may end in the crushing death of individuals and communities, but the strength of love, even when it appears to break, survives. I believe that’s Easter, not to remain as it is, and if it is to be, “to be” means to be unfinished.

 

Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday, and it is not about being distracted by singing and shouting, but about seeing the quiet Sophia Jesus moving through that moment, as we begin to wonder what he is truly passionate about. 

 

That passion is not loud or sensational.

 

His passion is the kingdom of God, to incarnate the love and justice of God, abundant life for all, and that is what we follow. 

 

This year, I ask another question, why did the Evangelists leave such long and detailed accounts of Holy Week?  

 

The record of Holy Week, preserving even the final cries of Jesus, is a rite for the dead and for the healing of the community. Jesus was not a victim whose life was taken against his will. He chose not to remain as the world is. He carried a vision and the path of God’s Sophia wisdom, the bravest confrontation of the Empire. 

Holy Week is about why the community must rightfully remember the death of Jesus, and how things could be otherwise if the world does not remain as it is.

 

Will we forget him and his death?

 

Will we bury him as if it were only silence?

 

Those who followed him glimpsed a new possibility of the kingdom of God. When the bread he touched was broken, they encountered grace. When the outcast he touched was returned to the community, the kingdom of God with no outcast became their passion.

 

To be or not to be. Even now, in this world and in our own lives, there are moments when someone we love leaves our side, and moments when we are invited to let go of our ego and hear God’s whisper through the whirlwind. What is your moment now, today, 

your moment of to be or not to be, 

to remain or not to remain as you are, 

for the world to remain or not to remain as it is, 

the moment of Palm Sunday? Is it now?

 

What is the passion of God, of Jesus, of Sophia, that you will choose in your Holy Week?

 

Palm Sunday, and following Jesus, is a message for all who choose to be brave. All who choose to be true to their whole self. For the love of God, who choose even to let go of what we have held too long so that we may live within the widest circle of God’s love.

 

As we conclude our reflection, I want us to remember this: Palm Sunday and Holy Week are about the last week of Jesus’ life, the most sacred time of the Christian year, and this Holy Week begins with the cry, “Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna.”

 

Hosanna in the scripture may sound like praise as the crowd repeatedly shouts, but its true meaning is “Save us, save us, save us.”

 

“Save us, please save us.”

Hebrew הוֹשִׁיעָה נָּא

to save (hoshia) and an urgent plea (na)

 

This was originally a desperate cry. The Hosanna moment is a crying out, save us. Even when it is not spoken aloud, it is carried within the passion of Jesus, within the widest love of God. 

 

Most of us carry many Hosanna’s moments in our lives, and the world through history and today goes through many Hosanna times, but Hosanna is never broken. Though our life’s ups and downs, the world’s “outrageous fortune or sea of troubles” may never stop coming back, Hosanna is bracketed again and again by the quiet Hallelujah at dawn. Even when Holy Week feels long, even when we are still within a sea of troubles, be brave, struggle, choose love, and hold another’s hand.

 

When we hold another’s hand, we don’t feel the strength of domination that shapes the world, but the strength of love which shapes our lives. We choose to be with the disciples in the exuberant love of this day, we choose to be with Christ in his Good Friday agony. At the end of that journey, Easter chooses us, now and forever.