The Entry, and the Palms

Palm Sunday opens Holy Week, the Sunday before Easter, commemorating Christ's entry into Jerusalem riding a donkey while crowds spread cloaks and branches and cried "Hosanna", an event recounted in all four Gospels and read as the deliberate, humble arrival of a king who comes in peace. Its characteristic rite is the procession with palms (or, in northern Europe, with box, willow or other local greenery), in which the congregation re-enacts the welcome, carrying branches that are later kept and, in the West, burned for the next year's Ash Wednesday ashes.

The observance is documented in fourth-century Jerusalem, where the pilgrim Egeria describes the bishop and people processing down the Mount of Olives on this afternoon, and it spread from there across Christendom. The liturgy holds a sharp irony at its centre: the same service that begins with the triumphal entry usually continues with the reading of the Passion, so that the crowd's "Hosanna" and the crowd's later "Crucify him" are heard within minutes of each other. The day thus opens the week not with unmixed celebration but with a welcome already shadowed by what is to come.