Double meaning of palms

5 Apr 2017 • Articles

Author: Terence Handley MacMath

The grocer who sells me olives and cheeses is Italian and a lapsed Catholic, so he knows all about Palm Sunday and Easter and so forth. But he said to me rather sadly that he doesn’t really enjoy going to mass any more, because the stories are always the same, year after year.

That seems extraordinary to me, because although the stories are the same, you hear them differently each time. It is well known that the Empress Helena went to the Holy Land in about 326 to find the holy places she had read about in the Gospels. Less well known is the trip made about 60 years later, by a Frenchwoman called Egeria. She wrote about everything she saw, and her interest was really liturgical. She watched how the Christians there worshipped, and one of the things she describes was how they always had a procession of palms to the Mount of Olives on Palm Sunday.

The story of the first Palm Sunday, as Jesus rode triumphantly into Jerusalem for the last extraordinary week of his earthly life, is told in the Gospels. In John’s account, the whole thing is a joyful triumph, after Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead — a kind of mini Easter day. In Luke’s Gospel, the palms don’t get mentioned at all. Instead, Luke tells us that the people threw down their cloaks at Jesus’s feet. They loved him while they thought he was powerful, but they abandoned him as soon as they realised that he wasn’t after that kind of power.

However you hear it, either as a festival of resurrection, or the bittersweet act of a dying king, the palms are at the heart of it – symbols of death and life, completely intertwined. Palm branches were waved for joy as a symbol of heaven, but also they are also used as symbol of violent death endured for God. (Martyred saints are often depicted holding a palm branch.)

What does this mean for us? Well, that we should not let the fear of death frighten us off following Jesus. It was hard for the crowd in Jerusalem, battered and taxed by the occupying Roman army. But we stand on the other side of Palm Sunday from them. We have seen the triumph that came at the end of Christ’s journey, even on the other side of death. Life and death are, indeed, interwined, but the strongest thread is always life.