Palm Sunday in Jerusalem!

Sorry this is late but I'm going to try to get the Easter week posts up soon. Installment #1!

It was amazing, to say the least. And it wasn’t even the whole Christian
community, just the western church. The Orthodox think they’re so cool with their different calendar that their Holy Week is this week, which is very inconvenient for me since I’ll be in Jordan most of the week and will therefore miss Orthodox Easter. Very sad.
Okay, angry rant over.

For Palm Sunday Chelsea and I and some friends decided to get up early for the Catholic service in the Holy Sepulcher. So much fun. The entire service was in Latin so I understood absolutely nothing and there were tons of people crammed into a pretty small space so at times I couldn’t see much either but the liturgy was beautiful and at the end all the clergy had palm branches and they made a procession around the tomb of Christ singing and shaking their palm branches. Everybody else got olive branches and followed along behind them and it was amazing hearing all the rattling branches and the singing and then thinking “Oh we’re walking in circles around the spot where Jesus was resurrected.” No big deal. Thankfully there were policemen telling me to hurry up and stay in line every now and then so I knew it was real.

That afternoon there was a city-wide march down the Mount of Olives following the path Jesus would have taken. Me and several friends then walked to the Mount of Olives, up it, and over down the other side a ways to get to the place where we would then walk over and down. That was a work-out, but it was so cool to walk across the Kidron Valley where all kinds of cool Bible stuff happened and look out at the city from the Mount of Olives. All along the way were tons of little kids probably from thirteen to four years old selling water bottles and palm branches. I couldn’t help but think that if I were a kid, this would be my favorite time of the year. You go out to your backyard, pick some branches off the nearest olive or palm tree, go out to the street, look cute, make a buck off a dumb tourist who doesn’t realize that if you want a branch you just have to look on the ground and find one. Some of the kids were so cute though I was tempted.

So pretty soon we’re all waiting around on the Mount of Olives for the procession to start and there were a TON of people. Nuns, priests, tourists from everywhere in the world, students, you name it and they were there. We even found a lady from Ipswich which was pretty cool. When the procession started we ended up in a mass of people and palm branches behind a group of
Spanish middle and high school students who were singing Spanish worship music at the top of their lungs. It was wonderful! We drifted a little bit and ended up traveling with another Spanish group of musicians with a microphone and sound system. They sang wonderful Spanish songs and we all danced while we walked. It was so beautiful to be rejoicing with those thousands of people celebrating the triumphal entry of Christ into the city. I couldn’t help but wonder if it felt something like this for the people walking with Jesus that day, except on a
slightly smaller scale.