Reflection for Palm Sunday
Entry of Christ into Jerusalem (1320) by Pietro Lorenzetti
Entrance Antiphon for Palm Sunday
When the Lord entered the Holy City, the children of the Hebrews, foretelling the resurrection of life, carrying palm branches cried out: “Hosanna in the highest.” When the populace had heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, they went out to meet Him, carrying palm branches. “Hosanna in the highest,” they cried.
Today is the last Sunday of Lent, the beginning of Holy Week, when the Church calls to mind the events of the final week of Jesus’s earthly life and sacramentally makes them present to us. The entrance antiphon for today presupposes that we are entering the church after a processional reenactment of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem. In many respects, the antiphon is simply an historical narrative, placing us, as it were, in that crowd crying “Hosanna” to the Savior.
However, one phrase makes a huge difference. How are the children of the Hebrews “foretelling the resurrection of life?” To begin with, this phrase is not from Scripture, the Church has inserted it as an interpretive key, just one instance of the rich interaction of Scripture and Tradition that is present in all the Church’s liturgy. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, quoting Dei Verbum, “Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture…are bound closely together and communicate one with the other. For both of them, flowing out from the same divine well-spring, come together in some fashion to form one thing and move toward the same goal.” [80] “Liturgy is a constitutive element of the holy and living Tradition.” [1124]
In this instance, both Old Testament and New Testament Tradition have come together to teach us how to celebrate Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. The word hosanna is a popular acclamation, derived from the Hebrew words meaning please save. They occur in Psalm 118, which is a processional psalm, sung by people going up to the Temple to celebrate the Lord’s ultimate victory over His enemies. According to St. Paul, “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” (I Cor. 15, 26) Thus Jesus, going up to Jerusalem surrounded by a jubilant crowd of people, is going up to His death, which will be solemnly proclaimed today in the reading of the Passion. The crowd, by crying “Hosanna,” is foretelling that His death will end in ultimate victory, in resurrection to life. Let us join them in their cry, knowing that, while we are remembering His passion today and the rest of the week, next Sunday we will celebrate His resurrection and our incorporation, through Baptism, into His saving life.