INTRO: We have come to another Palm Sunday day. By the next Palm Sunday we may be raptured to heaven. Our message this morning comes in the form of a question. It is this: Just what is Palm Sunday? To answer that, I will seek to answer these questions: What day of the week did this actually happen? You see, I did a message some years ago on the day we call Good Friday, and I said it wasn’t good and it wasn’t Friday. What day did the day we call Palm Sunday actually happen? Second, how did Palm Sunday get its name? And last, and certainly not least, what is significant about this day?
Well, by way of introduction, let me back up a few days before Palm Sunday. It is, in my reckoning, Nisan the 7th. You see Palm Sunday, in the Jewish calendar would fall either in the month of Nisan, or the month before which was Adar II, depending if it was a year with 12 or 13 months. Now the calendar is very complicated. The Jews had a religious year and a sacred year. Because there are 365 and ¼ days in a year, they had some years with 13 months and some with 12 to make up for the ¼ day each year. The months were reckoned from a lunar perspective of 29 or 30 days. That is because of the lunar cycles. Then some Jews, I understand, went by the solar year, and that caused further complications. |
