College Information & Events
24 March
What Makes This Week Holy?
In the Christian calendar Palm Sunday is the beginning of Holy Week. During this week Christians are asked to reflect on the meaning of Jesus' death on the cross, an event that took place nearly two millennia ago at a place which remains the epicenter of religious and political violence today.
The festival of Pesah, or Passover, the most celebrated Jewish holiday of the year, occurs at around the same time of year. Passover commemorates God's deliverance of the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt. Jesus had gone to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover with his disciples when he was caught in the web of events that led to his death. While most Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah, the New Testament weaves the central events of this week into one overarching story of redemptive history. As St. Paul put it, "For Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed" (1 Corinthians 5:7).
But what makes this week HOLY?
The Christian tradition declares that the eternal God of creation has come into our world, has stepped into our time and space, in the person of a Palestinian peasant named Jesus. The events of Holy Week mark what T. S. Eliot called "the point of intersection of the timeless with time." What happened one Friday in Jerusalem was not "once upon a time," but once for all time. As Jews re-enact the mighty act of God in saving his chosen people at the Exodus, so Christians are called to follow Jesus on his lonely trek from the Upper Room through Gethsemane to Calvary.
But what makes this week holy is something else. It is the fact that something happened back then and there, in space and in time, something so shattering that the grinding wheels of fate were stopped by it and death is now no longer allowed to have the final word.
Good Friday does not permit the kind of unscrupulous optimism usually found on our Easter greeting cards. But it does declare that at the heart of the universe there is a personal presence, a God who has chosen not to remain in his heaven, cocooned within himself, but who has become a part of the world he has made, and taken upon himself the burden of loving it back to himself. This he has done as a humbly born baby in a manger, as a suffering man on a cross.
We are invited by this holiest day of Holy Week to believe that decisions we make here and now can have consequences that will last forever, that time is a God-given opportunity to learn to love, and that love is the one thing we experience in time that remains in eternity.
Adapted from an article by Timothy George
http://www.christianitytoday.c...
And so we celebrate …
At School
Tuesday 30th March 8:00 p.m. Final Hours
Wednesday 31st March 8:00 p.m. Final Hours
Thursday 1st April 1:40 p.m. Holy Week Prayer; 10:00 p.m. Final Hours
Friday 14th April 8:00 p.m. Final Hours
In the Local Catholic Church
Sunday 27th March
Palm (Passion) Sunday. Jesus enters Jerusalem. Sunday Liturgy in Parish Churches.
Monday 28th March
7:30 p.m. Mass of the Oils. St. Patrick's Cathedral.
Blessing of the Oils for use in the sacramental life of the Diocese of Ballarat.
The TRIDUUM
Thursday 1st April
HOLY THURSDAY (Last Supper)
Friday 2nd April
GOOD FRIDAY (Death of Jesus)
Saturday 3rd April
EASTER VIGIL (Resurrection) / Sunday 4th April Easter Sunday
See below for Liturgy Times