Palm Sunday: the King on a Donkey
HOLY WEEK IN MEDIEVAL TIMES
The Medieval Holy Week Series:
Palm Sunday: The King Who Rides a Donkey
Triumph, Procession, and the Medieval Imagination
To the medieval Christian, Palm Sunday was not a symbolic remembrance, but a reenactment of the events of Jerusalem so many centuries prior. The day marked the beginning of the Great Week, when time thinned and the Passion unfolded not as distant history but as a visible drama for all to see and, in a sense, live. Medieval worshippers entered church expecting to walk with Christ, to shout hosannas, and to feel the tension between triumph and tragedy.
What? No Palms!?
The branches were blessed. As do Catholics and several of the major Protestant denominations today, medieval parishioners took the blessed palms home and kept them over doors or somewhere in the home. The medieval Christian took the blessing very seriously and believed the blessed branches protected their homes from lightning, fire, and, most importantly, demons.
The whole affair was not mere pageantry, but a liturgical procession, to make Christ’s entry into Jerusalem mystically present to each new generation.
The Liturgy of Two Moods
Palm Sunday’s Mass was of a dual nature, having both:
Joyful procession — Christ the King enters Jerusalem
Somber Passion reading — Christ is betrayed and condemned.
Medieval people understood this tension deeply: triumph that turns to sorrow, glory that hides suffering. The original Wheel of Fortune, in fact, was not a medieval game show based on spelling words (in fact, they didn't have much standardized spelling so that wouldn't have gone over so well), but a depiction of a wheel with a king on top and serf on bottom that reminded men they weren't guaranteed to stay on top, nor on bottom, but that fate might be kind or cruel to anyone.
Did they understand it more deeply than the average Joe today? My guess is that they did, as life was harder and death a more constant companion, which kept their thoughts more turned toward the afterlife and God than many today.
Father Francis X. Weiser explains the Palm Sunday Mass and its evolution from the fourth century in much greater detail. In medieval times, the palms (or branches) were usually blessed at a chapel or shrine outside the town, from which the people would process to the town. A boys' choir greeted them as they approached the gate, singing Gloria, laus et honor (Glory, Praise, and Honor):
Glory, praise, and honor
O Christ, our Savior-King
To thee in glad Hosannas
Inspired children sing.
The people and priests then knelt before the Blessed Sacrament or crucifix, whichever had led the procession, which then continued to the town's church with church bells ringing and flowers and branches being strewn ahead of the procession, much as it must have been at the actual event.
Throughout medieval times, the celebration changed in some ways. The procession was often shortened to a procession around the church itself. In some places, tombs were decorated and the priest sprinkled holy water over the graveyard.
The Scots of medieval times included relics in their processions. In England, and thus very likely in Scotland, the priest knocked at the west door of the church with the foot of the processional cross, symbolic of saying, Open for Christ! In Scotland, the west door often faced the village or the sea, such that it also symbolized Christ entering the village.
Both Scottish and English churches veiled their great crucifix during Lent. On Palm Sunday, that veil was lifted as the people knelt and sang Ave Rex Noster (Hail, our King).
Even among Scots, there might be differences. Shawn being at Glenmirril in the Highlands, would most likely have seen the people of the castle waving branches of willow, rowan, and juniper rather than the yew, boxwood, and willow common to the lowland practices. He would have seen the blessed branches hanging not merely in homes but put in byres, boats, and cribs to protect cattle, fishermen, and babies; put up on thresholds to guard against evil spirits, and used in season blessings of fields and flocks.
Shawn likely would have experienced a day that had more Gaelic chants than Latin, more clan gatherings, a procession on rugged outdoor landscapes moreso than from chapel to cathedral, and the churches, being in a poorer area of the country, often had only one door and that door faced wherever the landscape allowed it to. It was a day of clan gatherings.
As a historic side note, Robert the Bruce's coronation occurred on March 25, 1306, which was Palm Sunday that year.
Coming next: Holy Monday in medieval times.
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I find this perspective on Palm Sunday from the Venerable Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, to be very illustrative:
ReplyDelete“Why are you untying it (the ass the disciples were sent to find), this must be your answer. The Lord has need of it (Lk 19:31).
Perhaps no greater paradox was ever written than this – on the one hand the sovereignty of the Lord, and on the other hand his ‘need.’
This combination of Divinity and dependence, of possession and poverty was the consequence of the Word becoming flesh.
Truly, he who was rich became poor for our sakes, that we might be rich.
Our Lord borrowed a boat from a fisherman from which to preach; he borrowed barley loaves and fishes from a boy to feed the multitude; he borrowed a grave from which he would rise; and now he borrowed an ass on which to enter Jerusalem.
Sometimes God preempts and requisitions the things of man, as if to remind him that everything is a gift from him.”
—Archbishop Fulton Sheen (The Life of Christ)