Long-ish Palm Sunday Rant
A stunning confession: I have mixed feelings about the Palm Sunday liturgy. Remember how it goes? We start with the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on a “colt” (a little male donkey) in a sort of ‘mini-liturgy’ before we shake our palms around. After that, we have a regular worship service where the story of Jesus’ arrest, trial, and crucifixion is read. For a long time, I never really thought about how this day is structured. I grew up in a church that didn’t keep Holy Week, so when I began attending the Episcopal Church several years ago, the liturgy of the Palms and the reading of the Passion story was just something else to learn about. It did occur to me to be a little confused – yay, we’re happy! No, wait … we’re sad! – but I just figured that this prayer book that I was growing to love knew better than I did, and I went along for the ride.
But every year, I still felt a little off on the Sunday before Easter. I wanted to spend the week walking through those final, climatic days of Jesus’ life as they happened, but it seemed like we were cramming Palm Sunday and Good Friday all together in one service! After I began to study worship, I came to this observance with a suspicious eye, expecting to find that it hadn’t always been done this way. Perhaps a medieval accretion? A modern innovation? No such luck. One of the earliest accounts of Palm Sunday is from the fourth century when a woman named Egeria traveled to Jerusalem to observe the rites of Holy Week and wrote about it in a letter to her friends (side note: the rites of Holy Week are some of the first observances to really take hold in the early church – and Egeria is good reading for all of it!). Egeria’s group spent most of the day gathering together at suitable places in and around Jerusalem, singing songs and reading lessons. At 5:00 PM, they heard the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem while stationed on the Mount of Olives, then processed into the city waving tree branches and singing Psalm 118 (which we read as part of the Liturgy of the Palms). Marion Hatchett, who wrote a huge scholarly commentary on our Book of Common Prayer, says about this procession, “[it] moved slowly because it included elderly people and people carrying babies ….”[1]
Very palm-centric, right? Not so fast! The procession continued to the site of Jesus’ tomb, where a service of Evening Prayer was held, and ended at the site of the cross, where a special prayer was said before the people were dismissed. The Sarum Use, a medieval English form for worship after which a great deal of the first Prayer Book was patterned, has a complicated liturgy involving both the triumphant entry and the crucifixion. Some Protestant reformers eliminated the blessing of the palms and the procession, so their worship centered around the arrest, trial, and crucifixion narrative. Even so, the triumphant entry worked its way back into the day, so that back when Anglicans used to say Morning Prayer first, followed by the Eucharist, they would hear the happy story during the office and the sad story during the mass. Palms and Passion, together forever.
This past week, dispensing with all propriety, I complained in my best teenagery way to some other clergy about how jam-packed and confusing I think Palm Sunday is. Turns out my opinion is totally en vogue: to a person the small group of priests I spoke with took issue with the Palm Sunday service, and a few of them had amended theirs to primarily reflect the triumphant entry. Some churches had really beefed up their processions, too, with big frondy palms and outdoor gatherings. I began to imagine that simplified, botanically powerful worship was possible!
Filled with self-righteousness and new ideas, I got home from the colleague group and picked up my copy of Hatchett, expecting to find somewhere in his historical account a crotchety complaint about the Sunday before Easter that would align with mine. Sure enough, there it was – but not as I had anticipated. Remember how the triumphant entry made its way back into the service in the English Church by being read at Morning Prayer (which, again, was followed by a service of Holy Eucharist that included the Passion reading)? Well, even though people were supposed to go to Morning Prayer and stay for Eucharist, that didn’t always happen (either they went to just one service, or only one service was offered). As a result, they would have heard only the story about the palms or the story about the passion. Hatchett, describing this, writes,
…the contrast between the king joyously greeted by the crowd and the king reigning from a tree, condemned to death by the crowd, and the contrast between the shouts of “Hosanna” which greeted our Lord at his entry into Jerusalem and the cries of “crucify” later in the week – the particular contrasts which give the day its pathos and power – were lost to the worshippers.[2]
Well played, Professor Hatchett. The Sunday before Easter is a study in contrasts. And it’s not chronologically satisfying, but worship isn’t really about chronological timelines, after all. In a way, worship is about obliterating time. Not in the sense of doing away with history, or transcending human categories or that sort of thing. Worship is about bringing a sense of the eternal – the timeless – into history, which allows us to hold contrasting events together. And maybe there’s a creative tension, a spiritual tension even, that’s lost when we don’t do this.
On the other hand, I really do think that in a world where text, information, and memory are thrown at us all day, every day (this blog being Exhibit A), there’s something to be said for streamlining things. There’s some virtue in focusing on one event and one emotion, and doing it so well that people are drawn into the whole week of observances and arrive at Good Friday with a sense of terrible wonder and expectation, not yet having passed through that moment.
So there it is. My (and some other people’s, it seems) Palm Sunday ambivalence. The choice is between the potential virtues of a radical tone change within one liturgy, or the potential virtues of a straightforward celebration of and identification with Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. This is a late blog entry, posted on the Saturday before Palm Sunday, but if you read it today or during the upcoming week, email me at the church or stop me on Sunday and let me know what you think. Actually, let me know if you’ve ever thought about it. Let's muddle through this one a little bit.
(Danielle Thompson)
(Danielle Thompson)
