13. Carrying palm branches, with shouts of joy and triumph, they hailed Jesus as the Messias, and King of Israel; in the words of the great Paschal chant (Ps. cxvii. 26), *Hosanna* (הושׂענא, which is contracted for הושׂיעה נא) means: _pray_, _save_, or: _save, I beseech_. It may be taken here as a prayer to Jesus to save them, or rather as a prayer to God to save and bless their Messias. Or it may be that it was used as an expression of joy without attention to its literal meaning, as the expressions “vivat,” “vive le roi,” and the like, are sometimes used at the present day. 14. Et invenit Iesus asellum, 14. And Jesus found a young et sedit super eum, sicut ass, and sat upon it, as it is scriptum est: written: 14. From the Synoptic Evangelists we learn that Jesus sent His disciples telling them where they should find the colt, and St. Matthew tells us that they brought the colt and its mother, and spread their garments upon both (ἐπ᾽ αὐτῶν, Matt. xxi. 7). They spread their garments upon both, because they did not know upon which He would choose to sit. And St. Matthew adds that Jesus sat _upon them_ (ἑπάνω αὐτῶν); that is, as we take it, upon the garments that had been spread upon the colt. In this way the accounts of the four Evangelists are reconciled. Another difficulty occurs here, if we compare the parallel passage of St. Luke (xix. 29). For, whereas St. John’s account naturally leads us to suppose that the ass’s colt was procured on the way _between_ Bethania, where Christ had supped on the preceding night (xii. 1, 2) and Jerusalem, St. Luke, on the other hand, says: “And it came to pass _when He was come nigh to Bethphage and Bethania_, unto the mount called Olivet, He sent two of His disciples, saying, Go into the town which is over against you, at your entering into which you shall find the colt of an ass tied,” &c. We have searched in vain for a satisfactory solution of this difficulty. If the words of St. Luke are to be taken strictly as meaning that Christ was not merely near to, but _approaching_ Bethania, then we would hold that on this morning, before the procession started, He had retired from Bethania eastward, and therefore farther away from Jerusalem, and was now again approaching the village on His way to the Holy City. There is nothing improbable in this supposition, for Christ did many things which the Evangelists have not recorded (John xxi. 25), and it enables us to reconcile two accounts, which are not easily reconciled otherwise. 15. Noli timere filia Sion: 15. _Fear not, daughter of ecce rex tuus venit sedens Sion: behold, thy king cometh, super pullum asinae. sitting on an ass’s colt._