Red-Letter Day
also known as Passion Sunday, Sunday of the Passion, Dominica in Palmis
Palm Sunday is the Sunday before Easter, when the Church remembers the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and hears the Passion read at length. Branches are blessed and carried, and the acclamation of the crowd gives the day its oldest names. It opens Holy Week, and its joy is already shadowed by the Cross.
On the Sunday before Easter the Church walks a road. The Gospels tell of Jesus coming into Jerusalem, riding on a colt, met by crowds who spread their garments and cut branches from the trees, crying out the words of the psalm: Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Only John names palms. The other Gospels say branches, or leafy branches from the fields; the Church has kept the palm as the sign, and where palms do not grow it has kept willow, olive, box, and yew instead.
The day is not first of all a memory. It is a procession. The earliest description of it we have comes from a pilgrim who watched it happen. In Jerusalem, between 381 and 384, a woman named Egeria saw the whole congregation go up the Mount of Olives in the afternoon, and toward evening hear the Gospel of the children with their branches, and then walk the road down into the city behind their bishop. She noticed who was there. "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." She noticed that no one was excused the walk: "all, even those of rank, both matrons and men, accompany the bishop all the way on foot." She noticed that they went slowly, so that the people should not be wearied. And she saw what the walk meant: the bishop went before them, she wrote, "in the same manner as the Lord was of old."
That is the shape the day has kept, wherever it has been kept. The palm in the hand has meant different things in different centuries. Augustine, preaching in North Africa, told his people plainly what the branch was for: "The branches of palm trees are laudatory emblems, significant of victory, because the Lord was about to overcome death by dying, and by the trophy of His cross to triumph over the devil." A thousand years later an English parish priest, John Mirk, said the same thing to villagers in their own tongue, adding what it now also meant about them: that a man bore his palm in procession showing that he had fought with the fiend and had the victory of him by clean confession of mouth and repentance of heart. In the East, Andrew of Crete turned the branch back on the one who carried it, preaching that we meet Christ "not by covering his path with garments, olive branches or palms, but by doing all we can to prostrate ourselves before him by being humble."
And then the day turns. In fifth-century Rome there were no palms at all on this Sunday; there was the Passion, read aloud, and Leo the Great told his congregation it was simply too long to finish in one sitting. The two halves of the day, the acclamation and the Passion, have been carried together ever since, and the Church has never pretended they sit easily. The prayer our own tradition uses at the procession says it as directly as it can be said: that Christ "went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified." The branch is a victory sign held up on the road to the Cross, and it is not a mistake that it is both.
So we hold them, and take them home. The palms are kept behind a cross or in a Bible until Lent comes round again and they are burned for the ashes. What we carry on this day is not a token of a week that ends well by accident. It is the emblem of a victory won in the only way it could be won, by the King who came in meekly, on a borrowed colt, and did not turn back.
You know what is coming this week; that is the difficulty of the day. It is hard to shout with the crowd when you have read to the end of the story, and hard to hold a branch without feeling faintly theatrical. But the Church has never asked you to forget the ending. It hands you the palm precisely because of the ending: a sign of victory, given before the victory looks like one. The old parish preachers made the branch personal, a thing you could carry honestly only if you had made your peace first. That is a fair question to bring to the door of Holy Week. What would you need to set down, or confess, or forgive, in order to walk this road behind him without pretending?
Palm Sunday has no date-question of its own. It is the Sunday before Easter, so its date is settled wholly by the paschal computus it shares with the whole of Holy Week; East and West apply the same rule on different calendars, and so keep the day together in some years and up to five weeks apart in others. There is no rival tradition about which Sunday it falls on.
The observance's own history rests on one very strong witness and a long thin trail after it. Egeria's account of the Jerusalem procession, written between 381 and 384, is the earliest hard attestation and is an eyewitness of the fourth-century liturgy, not of the first-century event. Within a century or so of her, the Old Armenian Lectionary of Jerusalem records the day's appointed readings, so the rite there had settled into a book; the lectionary's dating (a Greek original of about 417 to 439, on Athanase Renoux's reckoning) is currently disputed by Hugo Méndez and should not be cited as fixed. A further claim, that a bishop of Edessa ordered the blessing of palms for the churches of Mesopotamia around 397, reaches us at three removes: a nineteenth-century compiler citing two late-antique writers, reported in a 1911 encyclopedia, and never traced to the Syriac texts. It is worth naming and not worth leaning on.
The West acquired the ceremonial late and slowly. The three oldest Roman sacramentaries contain no blessing of palms and no procession at all. The earliest notice is in the Gregorian sacramentary used in France in the ninth and tenth centuries, and its prayer blesses the bearers rather than the branches; Edmond Martène and Alessio Pelliccia found no mention of the ceremonies before the eighth or ninth century, with Amalarius of Metz the first to speak of them. The Gelasian sacramentary heads the day "Dominica in palmis, De passione Domini," and Ferdinand Probst argued in 1892 that the palms clause is a later addition to an original inscription naming only the Passion. Rome's own developmental order, on the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia's reading, runs: first the bearing of palms during the service, then the procession, then the blessing.
No council, patriarch, or pope is named anywhere as instituting this observance in East or West at any point before the twentieth century. That absence is the honest finding. What the sources show instead is organic diffusion from Jerusalem outward, elaborated heavily in the medieval West and then twice simplified.
In England the medieval ceremony was among the year's most elaborate, and it ended abruptly. Two facts belong together and are often collapsed into one: the ceremony of bearing palms was left off by Council directive in 1548, a year before Cranmer's first Book of Common Prayer took effect, and the 1549 book then simply made no provision for it. The day itself was never abolished; it kept its propers under the title "The Sunday next before Easter" through 1552, 1559, 1662, and the American books, while the blessing and the procession stayed gone for roughly four hundred and thirty years. The Westminster Directory of 1644-45 rejected the festal calendar wholesale ("Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued"), not Palm Sunday in particular. What happened between 1548 and the modern restorations is, in this material, almost entirely negative evidence.
The palm has rarely stayed in church. Medieval English parishes hired raiment for costumed Prophets, paid a man to play a Prophet outright, cleaned the churchyard, and bought ale for the singers of the Passion; a wooden Christ astride a donkey, the Palmesel, was drawn through German streets and the branches thrown before it scrambled for. People carried palm crosses in purses and set them over doors, threw blessed palm on the fire in thunderstorms, and in Cornwall dropped a palm cross into a holy well to learn whether they would see the year out.
Much of that continues, transposed. In the Byzantine churches the day is one of the Twelve Great Feasts, paired with Lazarus Saturday, with branches blessed at Matins and fish permitted in the midst of the Great Fast. Coptic Christians keep Sha'aneen with twelve Gospel readings at twelve stations; Ethiopians keep Hosaena, weaving fronds into rings and crowns to wear; Armenians reopen the Lenten curtain at Tsaghkazard and give the day largely to their children; Syriac and Malankara Christians keep Oshana, leaving by the north door and returning by the south. In the Philippines the woven palaspas is blessed and taken home to the windows and doors. In Spain La Borriquita opens Holy Week with a figure of Christ on a donkey, a bright and family-minded procession before the sombre ones. Where palms do not grow, willow and box and yew serve, in Poland and Russia alike; and in Wales, from the nineteenth century, Sul y Blodau made this the day for dressing the graves, drawing tens of thousands into the cemeteries of Cardiff and Swansea. In most of the Catholic West the branches come back at last to be burned: from the blessed palms the ashes are procured for Ash Wednesday.
Egeria, Itinerarium (The Pilgrimage of Etheria), trans. M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe (SPCK, 1919), section 2, "Palm Sunday," pp. 64-67. The source of the quotations about the children carried on shoulders, the walk taken by all ranks on foot, and the bishop escorted "in the same manner as the Lord was of old." Public-domain text: https://archive.org/stream/pilgrimageofethe00mccliala/pilgrimageofethe00mccliala_djvu.txt
Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, Tractate 51, §2. The source of "The branches of palm trees are laudatory emblems, significant of victory." https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1701051.htm
Andrew of Crete, Oratio IX, In ramos palmarum (PG 97:990-994), in the English of the Roman Office of Readings for Palm Sunday, translator uncredited. The source of "not by covering his path with garments, olive branches or palms, but by doing all we can to prostrate ourselves before him by being humble." https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/media/articles/palmsundayhecomesinhumility/
Leo the Great, Sermon 54 (De Passione Domini III), delivered on the Sunday before Easter, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 12, §VI. The source for the Passion being too long to finish in one sitting. https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf212/npnf212.ii.v.xxvii.html
John Mirk, Festial, sermon 26, "Dominica in Ramis Palmarum," ed. Theodor Erbe, Early English Text Society, Extra Series 96 (1905), pp. 114-116. The Middle English source paraphrased above on the palm as the sign of a confession completed. https://archive.org/download/mirksfestialcoll01mirkuoft/mirksfestialcoll01mirkuoft_djvu.txt
The Book of Common Prayer (2019), Anglican Church in North America, Palm Sunday. The source of the Procession collect quoted, "went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified"; the collect is William Reed Huntington's, proposed 1892 and adopted in the American book of 1928.
Westminster Assembly, A Directory for the Publick Worship of God (1644-45), appendix, "Touching Days and Places for Publick Worship." The source of "Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued."
F. G. Mershman, "Palm Sunday," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11 (1911). The source for the Gregorian sacramentary blessing the bearers rather than the palms, for Martène, Pelliccia and Amalarius, for the developmental sequence (bearing, procession, benediction), and for the line that from the blessed palms the ashes are procured for Ash Wednesday. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11432b.htm
John Brand and Henry Ellis, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, vol. 1, pp. 119-131. An anthology, not an authority: it supplies the churchwardens' accounts quoted above, the 1539 Proclamation, Stow under 1548, and the folk uses of the palm cross. https://archive.org/download/b29328561_0001/b29328561_0001_djvu.txt
Congregation for Divine Worship, Paschale Solemnitatis (16 January 1988), §§28-34: the modern Roman instruction on keeping the day, including the direction that the palms be taken home as a reminder of the victory of Christ. https://www.liturgyoffice.org.uk/Calendar/Seasons/Documents/Paschale-Solemnitatis.pdf
The modern sequence is the only clean legislative one. Pius XII's decree Maxima Redemptionis nostrae mysteria of 16 November 1955 restored the Holy Week rites to evening hours, permitted branches of palm, olive or other trees prepared by the faithful themselves, and renamed the day "Second Sunday of the Passion, or Palm Sunday"; a Declaration of 15 March 1956 extended the solemn rites more widely. John XXIII's Code of Rubrics in 1960 renamed the fifth Sunday of Lent "First Sunday of the Passion," a separate act often confused with the first. Paul VI's Mysterii Paschalis of 14 February 1969 suppressed Passiontide as a season and gave the day its present Roman title, "Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord." On the Anglican side, the Episcopal Church's 1979 prayer book printed the first Anglican palm-blessing prayer in about four hundred and thirty years under the title "The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday"; the Church of England restored a liturgy of the palms in Lent, Holy Week, Easter (1984, 1986); and the ACNA prayer book of 2019 heads the day simply "Palm Sunday."
One caution belongs here, because it trips almost everyone. "Passion Sunday" has named four different things. Before 1955 in the West it was the fifth Sunday of Lent, a separate day two weeks earlier opening the season of Passiontide. From 1955 both Sundays carried the name; from 1960 they were distinguished as First and Second. Only from 1970, in Roman use, are Passion Sunday and Palm Sunday one day. A medieval or patristic source naming Passion Sunday means a different Sunday.
Isaiah 52:13–53:12Psalm 22:1–22v or Psalm 22:1–11v or Psalm 31:10–18vPhilippians 2:5–11Matthew (26:36–75) 27:1–54 (55–66)
British (Received Pronunciation): Orléans /ɔːrˈliːənz/; Dominica in Palmis /doʊˈmɪnɪkə ɪn ˈpɑːlmɪs/
Almighty and everlasting God, in your tender love for us you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon himself our nature, and to suffer death upon the Cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and come to share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.