There is a moment in the Palm Sunday Mass that nobody warns you about.
You walk in holding a palm branch. The mood is festive — or as festive as Catholic liturgy gets, which is to say, measured and dignified, but with an unmistakable sense of occasion. The priest processes in. The opening reading is the triumphal entry — Jesus riding into Jerusalem while the crowd spreads cloaks on the road and shouts: "Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!" (Mt 21:8-9, NABRE).
You are the crowd. You are cheering. It feels good.
Then the Gospel is read. It’s the story of The Passion.
What happens next
The Passion — the full account of the arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus — is proclaimed aloud in parts. The deacon narrates. The priest reads the words of Christ. A lector takes the other voices. And the congregation reads the crowd.
Which means that about twenty minutes after you were waving your palm branch, you are standing in your pew reading the words: "Crucify him! Crucify him!" (Lk 23:21).
I have never gotten used to this. I don't think you are supposed to.
Why the Church does this
The easy version of Palm Sunday would stop at the parade. Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph. The crowd loves him. We wave our palms and go home feeling good about being on the winning side.
The problem is that the same crowd that cheered on Sunday was calling for his death by Friday. And the Church, to its credit, has never let us forget that we are that crowd.
Jesus himself was clear about the kind of king he was. He entered Jerusalem not on a war horse but on an ass — "meek and riding on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden" (Mt 21:5), fulfilling what the prophet Zechariah had written centuries earlier: "See, your king shall come to you; a just savior is he, meek, and riding on an ass" (Zech 9:9). This was a statement. It was also a warning that nobody understood in time.
The crowds expected a Messiah who would drive out the Romans and restore Israel's political power. What they got was a servant who washed feet and talked about a kingdom that was not of this world. The gap between what they wanted and what he was offering was wide enough to turn celebration into condemnation in five days.
What you take home
The palms are blessed at Mass and taken home. Many families tuck them behind a crucifix or above a door frame, where they stay for the rest of the year. Next Ash Wednesday, they will be collected, burned, and ground into ash that will be pressed onto foreheads at the start of the next Lent.
The cycle is not accidental. What you wave in celebration becomes what marks your mortality. This is the tradition's way of saying: do not be too comfortable on either side of the story.
Holy Week begins here. The days ahead — Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday — are the most concentrated liturgical experience in the Catholic year. Palm Sunday is the entrance. It sets the terms.
You are the crowd. You are holding palms. You know what is coming.
Go anyway.
Lord, we wave our palms, and we know what is coming. Walk into Jerusalem anyway. Walk into whatever needs to be entered in our own lives, and let us follow you there — even when we don't fully understand where “there” is. Amen.
Next: Holy Thursday — the night Jesus gave his disciples everything he had left to give.