Why is it called Palm Sunday?

Only John says palms

All four Gospels tell the entry into Jerusalem, but they disagree about the greenery. Mark and Matthew have cloaks and branches cut from the trees (Mark 11:8; Matthew 21:8). Luke has only cloaks spread on the road (Luke 19:36). John alone names the tree.

they took the branches of the palm trees and went out to meet him, and cried out, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, the King of Israel!”

Were they really palms? Date palms flourished in the Jordan valley below, where Jericho was “the city of palm trees” (Deuteronomy 34:3), and they grew around Jerusalem too: in Nehemiah’s day people fetched palm branches from the hills to build festival booths (Nehemiah 8:15). Mark’s Greek word is vaguer, leafy branches cut in the fields. Most likely the crowd waved whatever was green and at hand, and John chose the word that carried a meaning.

Why palms meant something

A palm branch meant victory and national hope. When Simon Maccabee took the citadel of Jerusalem from its Syrian garrison in 141 BC, his men went in “with praise and palm branches” (1 Maccabees 13:51). Palms were carried at the Feast of Booths (Leviticus 23:40) and at the first Hanukkah (2 Maccabees 10:7). After the war of AD 66–70, Rome struck coins of a mourning woman beneath a palm tree, stamped Judaea Capta, “Judea captured.” In Revelation the saved stand before the throne “with palm branches in their hands” (Revelation 7:9). A crowd waving palms and crying “Hosanna,” Hebrew for “save, please,” was greeting a king.

The procession that named the day

Christians soon began to reenact it. In the early 380s a pilgrim named Egeria, probably from Spain or Gaul, described the Jerusalem liturgy for the women of her community at home. On the Sunday that opens the great week, she writes, the people climb the Mount of Olives in the afternoon, hear the Gospel of the entry, and walk down into the city behind the bishop, singing “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” Even children too small to walk ride on their parents’ shoulders, holding branches of palm or olive (Egeria, Travels 31). The custom spread west, and the day took its name from it: Dominica in Palmis, the Sunday of the Palms.

Where there are no palms

Palms don’t grow everywhere, so churches improvise. In Russia and Ukraine the day is Willow Sunday, and people carry pussy willow. Italians bring olive branches; the Irish call it Yew Sunday. In Elche, in Spain, palm fronds are tied up and kept from the sun until they turn pale, then braided into intricate shapes. Elsewhere the leaves are folded into small palm crosses. In many churches the palms are kept for a year, then burned to make the ashes for the next Ash Wednesday.

What the day celebrates

Palm Sunday remembers Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, a week before Easter, and it opens Holy Week. The Catholic Church today calls it Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion: the service begins with blessed palms and a procession, then reads the whole account of the Passion. Orthodox churches call it the Entry of the Lord into Jerusalem and keep it the day after Lazarus Saturday. What happened in the days that followed is in what happened during Holy Week.