This Sunday is Palm Sunday. It signifies the moment that Jesus entered triumphantly into Jerusalem and acts as the starting point for Passion Week, the last week of Jesus’ life. Rather than focus on the final moments of Jesus’ life and his miraculous raising from the dead and over-coming sin for all of humanity – which is certainly something worth discussing – we should also spend a bit of time focusing on the earlier moments of the week and think about how it is relevant in the lives of our students here at St Brigid’s. What messages can they learn from Jesus’ preparations?
The key word here is to ‘prepare’. Jesus knew he was going to suffer, and he knew he was going to die. For our students, their knowledge of the future is hopefully not as extreme, but they do have some understanding of their future, and more so, they do have some specific understanding of their immediate future, particularly in their schooling lives over the next few weeks.
Weeks 8, 9 and 10, traditionally are the ‘crunch’ time of the term. Assessments are due, big events begin to take place and the stress levels begin to rise for both teachers and students. But it is the preparation of the earlier days of the Passion Week that allowed Jesus to meet his moments of challenge with a clam demeanour that has left us with the role model that he is today. As teachers, we have set up the St Brigid’s model for learning to allow for students to achieve a similar level of clam demeanour when facing their challenges. In the learning space, students are presented with Milestones and Checkpoints throughout the term, not as extra levels of stress along the journey, but as opportunities to space their journeys out, plan their progressions, learn from mistakes and offer the chance to grow before any of the ‘final’ judgements take place.
So as we enter into the Passion Week, don’t just listen to the stories of Jesus and wait for the bunny and chocolate to arrive. But rather, look for the messages (there a quite a lot!) and think how can these messages be put into practice in our everyday parts of our lives. Jesus lived and died for us, so maybe he might have been trying to tell us things we can put back into our lives.
On behalf of the Senior Leaders of the College, I wish you all a Happy Easter.
Dr Ashley Sadler
Assistant Principal, Evangelisation & Catechesis
