EVERY SUNDAY, MY wife and I get ourselves ready for church. I spend a good deal of the morning reviewing the Bible lesson I’ll be teaching when I get there, but eventually pack up my laptop and head out the door. We get in the car and drive a few miles on the freeway, then up a long steep hill until we arrive at the church parking lot.

Hundreds of other people could tell similar stories of their Sunday mornings. Each family drives itself to church, parks, and enters the building, where they are typically greeted at the door before entering the sanctuary.

But try to imagine this instead. One member of the church, perhaps someone in a leadership position, had been in a desperate situation, but prayed to God and was saved. He wants to tell his story and give thanks to God publicly, so a special event is scheduled. When the time comes, however, the people don’t enter the church separately. Before the service, they gather together in one place and then go in procession, with the man walking at the head of the crowd. When they arrive at the sanctuary, all of them are welcomed to come through the doors.

Can you picture it? Can you imagine the buzz among the people? Somehow, I imagine the mood would be much more celebratory than on a typical Sunday. And that would be wholly appropriate to the kind of gratitude the man wants to proclaim and share.

. . .

IN THE PREVIOUS post, we only looked at the first part of Psalm 118, in which the psalmist invites others to join in praising a merciful God before telling them why: I was in deep trouble. It felt like the life was being squeezed out of me. So I cried out to God — and he answered me! He is my refuge; he is our refuge, our safe place. Will you all join me in worship?

In the second part of the psalm, then, we can envision the psalmist walking at the head of a joyous procession of worshipers, coming to the gate of the temple and ceremonially asking to be admitted:

Open for me the gates of the righteous;
    I will enter and give thanks to the LORD. (Ps 118:19, NIV)

The gatekeeper responds in kind:

This is the gate of the LORD
    through which the righteous may enter. (vs. 20)

The psalmist then prays directly to God, declaring the reason for coming to the temple to worship:

I will give you thanks, for you answered me;
    you have become my salvation. (vs. 21)

Again, the devout psalmist is grateful for answered prayer. Accompanied by a crowd of worshipers, therefore, the psalmist brings a thanksgiving sacrifice to offer on the altar. Together, the crowd marvels aloud at the way the psalmist was saved, at the way what seemed to be a tragic story was miraculously reversed:

The stone the builders rejected
    has become the cornerstone;
the LORD has done this,
    and it is marvelous in our eyes.
The LORD has done it this very day;
    let us rejoice today and be glad. (vss. 22-24)

And then the crowd exclaims:

LORD, save us!
    LORD, grant us success! (vs. 25)

We might translate the people’s cry as, “Save now!” It doesn’t have to mean that the people are crying out to be rescued from calamity right this moment; after all, they’re at the temple to celebrate, not out on a battlefield somewhere. Rather, the exclamation may mean that they joyfully remember what God has done, and are crying out in the hope that God will continue to be the one who saves.

In Hebrew, the cry would sound like this: Ho-wo-shee-ah-nah. Does that sound familiar? In the New Testament, rendered into Greek, it’s the cry of the pilgrims heading into Jerusalem for the Passover as Jesus comes riding along on a donkey: Hosanna. Hold onto that thought; we’ll come back to it in the next post.

Meanwhile, as the gates are opened, the ministers of the temple welcome the psalmist with a blessing:

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD.
    From the house of the LORD we bless you. (vs. 26)

Verse 27 then presents a bit of a mystery. Here’s how it reads in the New International Version:

The LORD is God,
    and he has made his light shine on us.
With boughs in hand, join in the festal procession
    up to the horns of the altar. (vs. 27)

But in the New American Standard, the second part of the verse reads this way instead: “Bind the festival sacrifice to the horns of the altar with cords.” Unlike the NIV, there’s no reference to “boughs” or tree branches, just as the NIV has no reference to anything being bound with ropes or cords. And other translations read the sentence in slightly different ways as well.

The problem is that there’s some ambiguity in the Hebrew. The psalmist uses words that could be translated in different ways, depending on how one makes sense of the context. For example, where the NIV has “boughs in hand,” the New American Standard has “bind with cords.” That’s because the underlying Hebrew word refers to something twisted, which could be a branch from a tree or a length of rope.

And where the NIV refers to a “festal procession,” the NAS reads “festival sacrifice.” That’s because the psalmist uses a word that is typically translated as “feast” or “festival,” especially for the prescribed pilgrimage feasts like Passover. But the word can also be used to refer to something associated with the feast, like a sacrificial offering. (For you English teachers out there, it’s the literary device known as metonymy.)

However one translates the details, though, the basic picture seems clear enough. The animal may be bound on its way to the altar, or it may be bound to the altar itself, and either boughs or ropes are involved. But what matters is that the psalmist has come to the temple to offer a thanksgiving sacrifice, and is welcomed with open arms. There is a joyous procession, and the God of covenant love and mercy is worshiped by all.

It’s quite the picture of celebration, and it’s no wonder the psalm would be remembered during the yearly Passover feast. But as we’ll see, that makes the story of Palm Sunday and its aftermath that much more poignant.