On Palm Sunday, April 12, 2009, His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel celebrated the Holy Liturgy at the Patriarchal Cathedral in Bucharest. In his sermon, His Beatitude underlined the importance of the feast of the Entry of Our Lord into Jerusalem and said that the Gospel passage read on this holy feast is filled with spiritual meanings on several themes concerning the life of the Church and its faithful.

One of the themes of the Gospel read on Palm Sunday is that of the gratefulness towards Christ for His benefactions for the people and for the resurrection of Lazarus, expressed by the precious myrrh used by Mary of Bethany to anoint the Lord's feet. The Entry into Jerusalem is also a feast of Christ's victory over Lazarus' death and a foreshadowing of His victory over His own death. Furthermore, the feast opens up the week of the Holy Passion of Christ the Lord, reflected verbally in the confrontation with the leaders of the pharisees who hated and envied Him. The Gospel thus foreshadows the tension between Christ and those who planned to kill both Him and Lazarus, whose resurrection determined the people of Jerusalem to side with the Savior and to abandon their traditional teachers, the scribes and Pharisees.