Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday commemorates Christ's entry into Jerusalem on a donkey, five days before his crucifixion, when the crowds greeted him with palm branches and cries of "Hosanna," in fulfillment of the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9 (Matthew 21:1-11, Mark 11:1-11, Luke 19:28-40, John 12:12-19). It falls on the Sunday before Easter and opens Holy Week. The Book of Common Prayer titles the day "The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday," and its liturgy holds both realities together: the triumphal entry is read at the blessing of the palms, and the Passion narrative is read at the Eucharist that follows, so the same service that welcomes the king also announces his death.

The Gospels present Christ's entry into Jerusalem as the deliberate fulfillment of Zechariah's oracle: "Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey" (Zechariah 9:9, ESV). A king riding to war rode a horse; a king coming in peace rode a donkey. In choosing the colt, Jesus presented himself publicly, for the first time in his ministry without qualification, as the promised king of Zion, and as a king whose "salvation" would not be won by force. Matthew names the fulfillment outright (Matthew 21:4-5); John notes that even the disciples did not understand the connection to the prophecy until after the resurrection (John 12:16).

The observance of this day with a public procession is attested from the earliest period for which any detailed description of Jerusalem's liturgy survives. Egeria, a Western pilgrim usually dated to around 381-384 and generally identified as a nun or consecrated woman from Gaul or Spain, kept a diary of her stay in the city that is the earliest surviving eyewitness account of a Christian liturgical year anywhere. She describes the bishop and the whole congregation assembling in the afternoon at the church on the Mount of Olives called Eleona, and then, as the eleventh hour approached and the Gospel of the children meeting the Lord with branches was read, processing on foot down the mountain into the city. In M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe's 1919 translation, she records that "all the children in the neighbourhood, even those who are too young to walk, are carried by their parents on their shoulders, all of them bearing branches, some of palms and some of olives, and thus the bishop is escorted in the same manner as the Lord was of old". The procession moved slowly, she notes, so that the people should not be wearied, arriving at the Church of the Anastasis only as evening fell.

The Western church did not always read the entry and the Passion on the same day. For much of its history the Roman rite kept a separate "Passion Sunday" on the Sunday before Palm Sunday, opening a two-week season called Passiontide, while the following Sunday kept the palms and the triumphal entry alone. Twentieth-century liturgical renewal, which reshaped both Roman and Anglican practice, drew the Passion Gospel into the Palm Sunday liturgy itself, producing the compound observance now titled "The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday." The pairing is deliberate: the church places "Hosanna" and the reading of Christ's arrest, trial, and death within the same hour, so that the crowd's acclamation and its later demand for crucifixion, recorded within the same Passion narrative, are heard together rather than smoothed into two more comfortable Sundays.

The crowd's cry itself carries the day's tension inside a single word. "Hosanna" transliterates the Hebrew of Psalm 118:25, hoshia na, "save, we pray" or "save now," the same psalm from which the crowd draws its acclamation, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord" (Psalm 118:26; Matthew 21:9). By the first century the word had become an exclamation of praise as much as a plea, but its root meaning remained a request for rescue. The crowd was right to ask; it was wrong, within days, about the kind of rescue it would receive.

The day rests on the fourfold Gospel witness to Christ's entry into Jerusalem: Matthew 21:1-11, Mark 11:1-11, Luke 19:28-40, and John 12:12-19 (ESV). All four agree on the central facts: Jesus approached the city from the Mount of Olives, sent disciples ahead for a donkey, and was met with acclamation as the crowd hailed him with the words of Psalm 118:26. They differ in smaller details: only John names the branches as palms (John 12:13); Luke has the crowd spread their cloaks in the road but does not mention branches at all (Luke 19:36); and Matthew, closely following the Hebrew parallelism of the prophecy, names both a donkey and a colt, while Mark, Luke, and John mention only the colt.

The Gospel writers read the entry through Zechariah 9:9, a prophecy Matthew quotes directly: "Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey" (ESV).

The liturgy for the day falls in two parts. First comes the Liturgy of the Palms: branches are blessed, the Gospel of the entry into Jerusalem is read, and the congregation processes, carrying palms, in imitation of the crowd that went before and after Christ into the city. Then, at the Eucharist, the Passion Gospel is read at length, often divided among several voices, with the congregation taking the part of the crowd, so that the same worshippers who have just processed with palms and cried "Hosanna" also speak the crowd's later cry against him.

The discipline of the day is to walk that distance without flinching from it. A worshipper enters the liturgy waving a branch and leaves it having spoken the words that condemned Christ to death, inside the same hour, inside the same body of people. Holy Week does the same thing at greater length: it opens with acclamation and closes at the foot of a cross, five days later, in the same city. The service does not explain the distance between the two. It asks the congregation to walk it.

Palm Sunday is kept above all by the blessing and distribution of palm branches (or, where palms are not available, other greenery such as pussy willow or box), and by a procession, however brief, that recalls the crowd's approach to Jerusalem. It has long been customary, especially in Anglican and Catholic parishes, for worshippers to fold their palm into a small cross to carry home and keep, often above a doorway or in a prayer corner, until the following year; the precise origin of the folding practice itself is not well documented, though the custom is widespread today.

A related and well-attested custom is the burning of the previous year's palms to produce the ashes used the following Ash Wednesday. The palms distributed at one Palm Sunday are saved, dried, and burned roughly six weeks before the next one, so that the ashes marked on the forehead at the start of Lent are made, quite literally, from the branches that once welcomed the Lord. The custom binds the two ends of Lent together: the ash that begins the season and the palm that ends it come from the same plant.

Red is the color of the day, called Passion red in the older Sarum tradition, the same red used through the rest of Holy Week for the reading of Christ's suffering. It marks Palm Sunday as a day of the Passion as much as a day of welcome.