Palm Sunday
Palm Sunday is
the final Sunday of Lent, the beginning of Holy Week, and commemorates the
triumphant arrival of Christ in Jerusalem, days before he was crucified. Palm Sunday is known as such because the
faithful will often receive palm fronds which they use to participate in the
reenactment of Christ's arrival in Jerusalem. In the Gospels, Jesus entered
Jerusalem riding a young donkey, and to the lavish praise of the townspeople
who threw clothes, or possibly palms or small branches, in front of him as a
sign of homage. This was a customary practice for people of great respect.
Palm branches
are widely recognized symbol of peace and victory, hence their preferred use on
Palm Sunday.
The use of a
donkey instead of a horse is highly symbolic, it represents the humble arrival
of someone in peace, as opposed to arriving on a steed in war.
A week later,
Christ would rise from the dead on the first Easter.
During Palm
Sunday Mass, palms are distributed to parishioners who carry them in a ritual
procession into church. The palms are blessed and many people will fashion them
into small crosses or other items of personal devotion. These may be returned
to the church, or kept for the year. Because the palms are blessed, they may
not be discarded as trash. Instead, they are appropriately gathered at the
church and incinerated to create the ashes that will be used in the follow
year's Ash Wednesday observance. The colors of the Mass on Palm Sunday are red
and white, symbolizing the redemption in blood that Christ paid for the world.
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