March 29: The Road Into Jerusalem

This morning in churches from Rome to Rio de Janeiro, from Lagos to Los Angeles, from Manila to Moscow, worshippers are filing into services carrying palm fronds — or, in climates where palm trees do not grow, willow branches, olive branches, or pussy willows. In the Philippines, the palms are woven into intricate crosses and flowers. In Russia and Ukraine, willow branches stand in for palms as a centuries-old local tradition. In Jerusalem itself, pilgrim processions descend the Mount of Olives along the same route that the Gospels describe. The scene is at once ancient and immediate: the same week, the same branches, the same word of acclaim — two thousand years of Holy Weeks converging on this Sunday morning in 2026.

A King Who Rode a Donkey

The story of Palm Sunday is told in all four canonical Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — the only event in Jesus's ministry, outside of the Passion itself, to appear in every account. According to the Gospels, Jesus approached Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, riding on a donkey that had never been ridden. Crowds gathered and spread their cloaks and cut branches on the road before him, hailing him with cries of "Hosanna" and "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." The choice of a donkey was not incidental. In the ancient Near East, a king rode a horse when going to war — and a donkey when arriving in peace. The crowds understood the messianic resonance immediately: the prophet Zechariah had written, centuries earlier, "See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey." The palm branch carried its own freight of meaning: in Greco-Roman culture, the palm was a symbol of triumph and victory; in Jewish tradition, it was used at the great harvest festival of Sukkot; on Hasmonean coins it represented Jewish sovereignty. When the crowd waved palms before Jesus, the gesture was a deliberate and layered proclamation — a king is here.

The first formal liturgical observance of Palm Sunday dates to the 4th century, when Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem began re-enacting the entry in procession — the earliest recorded account comes from a traveler named Egeria, whose diary describes the ceremony taking place toward the end of the 300s, with the bishop riding a donkey down the Mount of Olives while the congregation carried branches and sang hymns. By the Middle Ages, Palm Sunday processions had become among the most elaborate in the Christian liturgical calendar, sometimes featuring a wooden carved donkey on wheels bearing a Christ figure, pulled through the streets while the congregation processed behind. In many traditions, the palms blessed on Palm Sunday are kept through the year, burned the following Ash Wednesday to produce the ashes used in the season of Lent — a cycle of dust and fire and new green branches that has turned, without interruption, for two millennia.

What makes Palm Sunday theologically and historically remarkable is the tension it holds. It is simultaneously the moment of greatest public acclaim in Jesus's ministry and the opening of the week that ends at the cross. Luke's Gospel captures this directly: as Jesus approaches the city and the crowd cheers, he stops, looks at Jerusalem, and weeps — grieving over what is coming, even as the palms wave around him. The theologian N.T. Wright has called the triumphal entry one of the most politically charged acts in the Gospels: a deliberate, public messianic statement made in the shadow of Roman imperial power, where the emperor's cavalry made their own kind of processions, on warhorses, through city gates. Jesus's procession came from the other direction — from the humble east, on a borrowed donkey, through a gate meant for pilgrims — and the crowd met him there. Today, as they have every Palm Sunday for seventeen centuries, Christians around the world do the same.