"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
THE SHAPE OF THE DAY
There is a moment in the Gospel of John, three years into the public ministry of Jesus, when the trajectory of everything changes. The Pharisees, watching the crowd stream toward Bethany to see the man who had raised Lazarus from the dead, say to one another in something close to despair: "You see that you are gaining nothing. Look, the world has gone after him." (John 12:19)
The world has gone after him. And so He comes — not quietly, not by the back roads, not under cover of darkness as a fugitive might enter a hostile city. He comes publicly, deliberately, in the full blaze of a Passover crowd, on a road lined with branches and cloaks, to the sound of a city crying out the words of the ancient psalm: Hosanna. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
This is Palm Sunday — the Sixth Sunday of Lent, the beginning of Holy Week, the day on which the Church each year relives the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and begins the solemn liturgical journey that will reach its end only at the Easter Vigil. In the traditional Roman Rite, it is called Dominica in Palmis de Passione Domini — the Sunday of Palms of the Passion of the Lord — a title that holds both truths together in a single breath: palms and Passion, triumph and Cross, the shout of hosanna and the cry of crucify him, separated by five days.
Nothing about Palm Sunday is accidental. Every detail — the animal chosen, the road taken, the city entered, the words cried out — is freighted with theological meaning so dense and so precise that the whole of the Old Testament seems to have been pressing toward this single afternoon.
THE ROAD FROM JERICHO: THE APPROACH
Jesus does not simply appear in Jerusalem. He journeys toward it — and the journey is itself part of the meaning.
He has come up from Jericho, the lowest city on earth, sitting nearly 260 metres below sea level in the Jordan Valley. The road from Jericho to Jerusalem climbs over a thousand metres in approximately twenty-four kilometres, through the bleak limestone wilderness of the Judean desert — a road notorious for bandits (the road of the Good Samaritan, Luke 10:30), barren and exposed, rising steeply through wind-scoured wadis toward the holy city on its ridge.
On this road, at Jericho, two blind men had cried out to Him: "Lord, have mercy on us, Son of David!" (Matthew 20:30). He had stopped and healed them. The title they used — Son of David — is the messianic title, the title of the king promised to Israel from the lineage of David, the king who would restore the kingdom and reign forever over the house of Jacob (2 Samuel 7:12–16; Luke 1:32–33). The blind men at Jericho announced, unknowingly, what the whole city of Jerusalem would shout one week before His death.
On this road, at Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus stops and sends two disciples ahead with instructions of extraordinary precision: "Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me." (Matthew 21:2). If anyone objects, they are to say: "The Lord needs them." — and they will be released immediately. Everything has been arranged. The entry is not improvised. It has been prepared — not merely by the disciples' advance work, but by the providence of God across centuries of prophetic promise.
THE MOUNT OF OLIVES: WHERE THE KING MUST COME
The Mount of Olives is not simply a convenient hill east of Jerusalem. In the geography of biblical prophecy, it is the designated place of the Messiah's coming.
Zechariah 14:4 had prophesied: "On that day his feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives that lies before Jerusalem on the east." This is the eschatological oracle — the great Day of the Lord, when God Himself would come to Jerusalem in judgement and salvation, would stand on the Mount of Olives, and the mountain would split in two. Every Jew who watched Jesus descend from the Mount of Olives toward Jerusalem that day was watching someone walk, step by deliberate step, into the landscape of this prophecy.
The Mount of Olives was also the route of David's flight from Jerusalem during the rebellion of his son Absalom — "David went up the ascent of the Mount of Olives, weeping as he went, barefoot and with his head covered" (2 Samuel 15:30) — the king going out in humiliation. Now the Son of David comes back, on the same mountain, in the opposite direction: from the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem, to the shouts of a welcoming crowd. The exile reversed. The king returning.
Luke tells us that as Jesus descended the Mount of Olives and the whole city of Jerusalem came into sight, He wept over it (Luke 19:41–44). In the midst of the crowd's rejoicing — palms, cloaks, hosannas — He stopped and wept. The Greek is eklausen, the full emotional weeping of deep grief. He wept and spoke a lament over Jerusalem that is one of the most heartbreaking passages in the Gospel:
"Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation." — Luke 19:42–44
He is entering the city in triumph. He is weeping as He enters. Both are simultaneously true. The Palm Sunday crowd is shouting hosanna; the King of Palm Sunday is weeping over what hosanna cannot prevent. This is the Incarnation's full weight: God who knows the future, entering the city that will kill Him, grieving not for Himself but for the city that will not receive what He has come to give.
THE ANIMAL: THE THEOLOGY OF THE DONKEY
"Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion... Behold, your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey." — Zechariah 9:9
The choice of the donkey is the theological heart of the entry — and the one detail that all four Evangelists record with emphasis, because all four recognise it as the explicit fulfilment of Zechariah's prophecy.
In the ancient Near East, the king's mount was a declaration of purpose. A war-horse announced conquest, military power, subjugation. A donkey — specifically, a young donkey on which no one had yet ridden — announced peace, humility, and a kingship of a different kind entirely.
The kings of Israel had ridden donkeys (1 Kings 1:33 — David sending Solomon to his coronation on the royal mule). The donkey was not a sign of poverty or weakness in itself; it was the mount of the king coming in peace rather than war. Zechariah's king is not the conquering military messiah many in first-century Palestine were waiting for. He is the king who brings peace — and who establishes that peace not by the sword but by the weapon that His enemies are about to use against Him and that He will transform into the instrument of universal redemption.
Matthew, following the Hebrew text and its poetic parallelism carefully, mentions both a donkey and a colt (Matthew 21:2, 7). Mark and Luke, following the Aramaic tradition, mention only the colt. Matthew is not describing Jesus riding two animals — he is citing Zechariah's poetic parallelism where "donkey" and "colt, the foal of a donkey" are synonyms in Hebrew poetry, both referring to the same animal. The Evangelists are making a single point with complete convergence: Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a young donkey in precise, deliberate, unmistakeable fulfilment of the prophet Zechariah's promise of a humble, peaceful, saving king.
St. John Chrysostom, in his Homilies on Matthew: "He who rides upon the cherubim comes now seated on a donkey — to teach us humility by everything He does."
THE CROWD: WHO IS THERE AND WHAT THEY WANT
Four Gospels record the entry. Four accounts together give a more complete picture of the crowd than any one account alone.
The disciples are there — spreading their cloaks on the road (Matthew 21:8; Luke 19:36), the traditional honour paid to kings (2 Kings 9:13, where Jehu is proclaimed king over a carpet of cloaks). They are beginning to understand something — Luke says they "began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen" (Luke 19:37) — though John notes, with characteristic honesty, that they did not fully understand it until after the Resurrection (John 12:16).
The Jerusalem crowd is there — the permanent inhabitants of the holy city, the people who have lived in the shadow of the Temple and the Roman garrison all their lives. They go out to meet Him (John 12:12–13) — an act with precise political resonance, because in the ancient world, going out to meet an approaching dignitary was the formal civic act of welcome given to kings and generals. They are doing something that looks, to the Roman garrison watching from the Antonia Fortress above the Temple, very much like a political demonstration.
The Galilean pilgrims are there — the vast crowds who have come up to Jerusalem for the Passover, the festival that commemorated Israel's liberation from foreign oppression. Passover in Jerusalem under Roman occupation was always politically charged. This Passover, with the man who raised Lazarus entering the city, is extraordinary. Matthew records that the whole city was stirred — the Greek eseisthΔ means shaken, as by an earthquake — asking: "Who is this?" (Matthew 21:10).
The crowd that had witnessed the raising of Lazarus is there — John specifically identifies them (John 12:17–18), following Jesus and testifying to what they had seen at Bethany. Their presence is the fuel on the fire of the crowd's excitement.
What does the crowd want? This is the question Palm Sunday presses upon every reader of the Gospel, because the answer is both inspiring and tragic. They want a king — but they want the kind of king they have already imagined. They want the military-political messiah who will drive out the Romans and restore the Davidic kingdom in its former earthly glory. They wave palm branches — baia phoinikΕn in John 12:13 — the branches associated since the Maccabean revolt with national liberation, with the restoration of Israel's independence, with the celebration of military victory. They are right about who He is and wrong about what He has come to do. They are right that He is the Son of David, the King of Israel, the Blessed One who comes in the name of the Lord. They are wrong that His kingdom will look anything like what they have in mind.
Five days later, the same city will cry "Crucify him." The hosannas of Palm Sunday and the cries of Good Friday are not as contradictory as they seem. Both are the response of a people who encountered the true King and found Him to be something other — something simultaneously far greater and far more demanding — than they had imagined.
THE CRY: HOSANNA
"Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!" — Matthew 21:9
The word Hosanna is the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew hoshi'ah na — found in Psalm 118:25: "Save us, we pray, O LORD! O LORD, we pray, give us success!" It is a cry for salvation — a verb in the imperative: Save now! In its liturgical use at Passover and Sukkot (the Feast of Tabernacles, where worshippers waved the lulav — palm branches — and chanted Psalm 118), it had become a shout of praise, of jubilation, of eschatological expectation. The crowd is quoting the great Hallel psalm at the man they believe to be the messianic saviour — the one whose coming they have been waiting and praying for across centuries of exile and occupation.
Psalm 118 is the Psalm of the King who comes in God's name — the Psalm quoted most frequently in the New Testament, the Psalm that the early Church recognized as the most fully messianic of the Psalter. Its verses surround the Palm Sunday narrative like a frame:
"The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone" (Psalm 118:22) — quoted by Jesus Himself after the Parable of the Tenants (Matthew 21:42), applied by Peter to the rejected and risen Christ (Acts 4:11), and used by Paul (Ephesians 2:20) and the author of 1 Peter (1 Peter 2:7) as a foundational image of the resurrection.
"This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it" (Psalm 118:24) — the verse that, in the Easter liturgy of the Church, becomes the proclamation of the Resurrection.
"Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD" (Psalm 118:26) — the verse the crowd shouts on Palm Sunday, the verse that appears in the Sanctus of every Mass in every rite of the Catholic Church, sung by the congregation at the culmination of the Preface just before the Eucharistic Prayer and the consecration. Every Mass re-enacts Palm Sunday: the congregation crying "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord" at the moment Jesus is about to become truly, substantially present on the altar.
The Pharisees in the crowd, alarmed at what the crowd is shouting, tell Jesus to rebuke His disciples. His answer is one of the most memorable in the Gospel: "I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out." (Luke 19:40). The entry of the King into His city is an event of such cosmic weight that creation itself would not stay silent in its presence. The stones beneath the road would take up the cry if the human voices were stilled.
THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE
The entry into Jerusalem does not end with palms and hosannas. It ends in the Temple.
"And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, 'It is written, My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you make it a den of robbers.'" — Matthew 21:12–13
The sequence is deliberate. Having entered the city as King, Jesus enters the Temple as Lord of the Temple — and acts with the authority of the Lord whose house it is. This is the second of two Temple cleansings in the Gospel record: John places one at the beginning of the ministry (John 2:13–22); the Synoptics place one here, on the day after the triumphal entry (Matthew 21:12; Mark 11:15). Whether these are the same event or two separate cleansings has been debated since the early Church — but the theological significance in the Synoptic placement is unmistakeable: the entry into the city and the entry into the Temple are a single act of royal and prophetic authority.
The commercial activity Jesus drives out was not, in itself, corrupt. The money-changers provided a genuine service — converting Roman coins (which bore the image of Caesar and were therefore prohibited from the Temple treasury) into the Tyrian shekel required for the Temple tax. The animal sellers provided pilgrims with the sacrificial animals they needed for offerings. All of this took place in the Court of the Gentiles — the outermost court of the Temple, the only space within the Temple precinct to which non-Jews were permitted, the space that was meant to be the meeting point between Israel and the nations, the place where a Gentile might come to pray toward the God of Israel.
The Court of the Gentiles had become a market. The one space in the entire Temple complex designated for the nations to encounter the God of Israel had been converted into a trading floor. And Jesus drives it out — citing Isaiah 56:7 ("My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples") and Jeremiah 7:11 ("Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes?"). He quotes the two prophetic texts that together announce the universal scope of the Temple's purpose and the corruption of that purpose. His anger is not arbitrary. It is the anger of the one who came "to seek and save the lost" (Luke 19:10), confronting the structures that have made it impossible for the lost to be found.
Mark, with his characteristic precision, adds the detail that Jesus "would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple" (Mark 11:16) — stopping even the commercial traffic that used the Temple courts as a shortcut. He is reclaiming the entire sacred precinct for its proper purpose.
The immediate result: "And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them." (Matthew 21:14). The space from which the commercial barriers have been cleared is immediately occupied by those who need healing — those who, under the Levitical law, had been excluded from the Temple altogether (2 Samuel 5:8). Where the traders had been, the blind and lame come. The King of the poor claims the house of God for those it was meant to welcome.
THE CHILDREN IN THE TEMPLE
"But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple, 'Hosanna to the Son of David!' they were indignant and said to him, 'Do you hear what these are saying?' And Jesus said to them, 'Yes; have you never read, "Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise"?'" — Matthew 21:15–16
The children in the Temple — continuing the cry of the palm procession, Hosanna to the Son of David! — are the detail that makes the chief priests and scribes indignant. They do not object to Jesus healing the blind and the lame. They object to the children shouting the messianic title in the Temple. The title Son of David in the Temple precincts is a political and theological claim they cannot allow to pass unchallenged.
Jesus answers from Psalm 8:2: "Out of the mouth of babes and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger." He is saying: the praise of children is not an embarrassment to be silenced. It is the fulfilment of Scripture. Where the learned and powerful have failed to recognise the King, the children — in their unguarded, unself-conscious joy — have seen what their elders cannot see.
St. Augustine comments on this passage in his Expositions of the Psalms: the children represent the humble, the simple, the poor in spirit — those who have received the Kingdom because they have not constructed the elaborate defences of pride and reputation that keep the mighty from entering it. The children's hosanna is more theologically accurate than the scribes' indignation.
THE FIG TREE: THE SIGN OF JUDGEMENT
Between the entry into Jerusalem and the cleansing of the Temple, Mark inserts — and Matthew follows — an episode of severe and, at first reading, puzzling judgement: Jesus curses a fig tree that is in leaf but bears no fruit (Mark 11:12–14, 20–25; Matthew 21:18–22).
It is the one destructive act in the entire Gospel — the one miracle that destroys rather than heals, the one exercise of divine power that produces death rather than life. Jesus is hungry. He sees a fig tree in leaf and goes to it expecting figs. He finds none. "May no fruit ever come from you again." The next morning, Peter notices that the fig tree has withered to its roots.
The fig tree is a symbol with a long history in the prophetic tradition of Israel — Micah 7:1 ("there is no cluster to eat, no first-ripe fig that my soul desires"), Hosea 9:10 ("Like grapes in the wilderness, I found Israel"), Jeremiah 8:13 ("there are no grapes on the vine, nor figs on the fig tree; even the leaves are withered"). The fruitless fig tree is consistently the image of Israel's spiritual failure — the external appearance of religious life without the interior reality of faith and repentance.
The fig tree in leaf but without fruit is Jerusalem on Palm Sunday: the appearance of welcome, the branches and cloaks and hosannas — without the fruit of true recognition, true repentance, true conversion of heart. It will not bear the fruit the King has come to harvest. The judgement of the fig tree is the enacted parable of the judgement that hangs over the city whose welcome is real but whose understanding is not yet deep enough.
But the episode does not end with judgement. Jesus immediately turns the withered fig tree into a lesson about the power of faith and prayer: "If you have faith and do not doubt... even if you say to this mountain, 'Be taken up and thrown into the sea,' it will happen." (Matthew 21:21). The mountain — this mountain, the Mount of Olives still visible before them — can be moved by faith. The judgement is real; but so is the invitation to the faith that moves beyond the failure of fruitlessness into the life of prayer.
PALM SUNDAY IN THE LITURGY
The liturgical celebration of Palm Sunday in the Catholic Church is one of the most layered and dramatically rich of the entire year — holding simultaneously the triumph of the entry and the desolation of the Passion in a single liturgical act.
The celebration begins not inside the church but outside — with the blessing of palms (or, where palms are unavailable, olive branches, laurel, box, or yew, following the ancient adaptation of the Roman Rite to Northern climates), a reading of the entry narrative, and a procession into the church that re-enacts the Palm Sunday procession. The congregation carries blessed palms and enters singing the ancient antiphon Pueri Hebraeorum — The children of the Hebrews, carrying olive branches, went to meet the Lord, crying out and saying: Hosanna in the highest. The procession is not merely ceremonial. It is the congregation placing themselves in the crowd on the road, assuming the role of those who cried hosanna, accepting the invitation and the challenge of that cry.
Then, at Mass, the Passion narrative is proclaimed — in full, in its entirety, as the Gospel of the day. On Palm Sunday, the Church does not permit the comfort of the triumphal entry to be the last word. The palms are in the congregation's hands; the Passion of the Lord is in their ears. The entire arc of Holy Week is compressed into a single liturgy: from "Hosanna in the highest" to "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit" in the course of a single hour.
The palm branches themselves are taken home and kept — in Catholic households across India, Latin America, Southern Europe, the Philippines, and around the world — often tucked behind a crucifix or a sacred image, as a year-long reminder of the day the King entered His city. At the end of the year, they are returned to the church and burned to produce the ashes used on the following year's Ash Wednesday — completing the liturgical cycle: the palms of triumph become the ashes of penitence, the hosanna becomes "Remember that you are dust."
THE MEANING FOR EVERY CHRISTIAN
Palm Sunday poses a question to every Christian who holds a palm branch, enters the church in procession, and joins their voice to the ancient cry of the crowd: What kind of welcome am I giving the King?
The crowd on the first Palm Sunday was not insincere. The hosannas were real. The branches and cloaks were laid with genuine honour. The problem was not insincerity but inadequacy — their welcome was as large as their understanding of who He was, and their understanding was not yet large enough. They welcomed the king they had imagined; they were not yet ready to welcome the King He actually was.
The challenge of Palm Sunday, returning each year in the Church's liturgy, is the challenge of expanding the welcome — of allowing the King to be who He actually is rather than who we have decided He should be. Of welcoming not just the triumphant entry but the Table in the Upper Room, the Agony in the Garden, the Cross on the hill. Of following the procession not just to the gates of the holy city but all the way to the tomb — and beyond it.
St. Andrew of Crete, in his Great Canon — the longest and most penitential hymn of the Byzantine tradition, chanted during the first week of Great Lent — puts the challenge in the voice of the soul speaking to itself: "My soul, my soul, arise! Why are you sleeping? The end is drawing near, and you will be confounded. Awake, then, and be watchful, that Christ our God may spare you, who is everywhere present and fills all things."
The palms we carry on Palm Sunday are not decorations. They are a declaration. A declaration that we have seen who is coming down the road and we have gone out to meet Him — not with the welcome of the confused and the disappointed, but with the welcome of those who have followed Him through Holy Week, who have knelt at the foot of the Cross, who have stood at the empty tomb, and who know what the hosanna is for.
A CLOSING PRAYER
Lord Jesus Christ, King who came not on a war-horse but on a donkey, who descended the Mount of Olives in triumph and wept over the city spread before you —
let my welcome of You be worthy of who You are.
Not the welcome of the crowd that wanted You to be what they had already decided, but the welcome of the disciples who spread their cloaks on the road because they had seen the mighty works You did and knew that something was passing by that would not pass again.
Give me the hosanna of the children who cried out in the Temple without calculation, without condition, simply because they knew a King when they saw one.
And when the Passion follows the palms — as it always does, in Your life and in mine — let me not fall silent. Let the hosanna become the courage to follow all the way to the end.
Amen.
"And the crowds that went before him and that followed him were shouting, 'Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!'" — Matthew 21:9
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