Dear Friends in Christ,
Our Holy Week Journey has begun! This is the most sacred time in the Church’s liturgical year. We retrace the final days of Jesus’ journey that will lead to Calvary and Resurrection on Easter Day! 
It is a personal journey of faith also. I encourage all of our parish community to enter into the full spirit of this Holy & Most Sacred Week. It can be a real moment of grace for you and your families. This weeks’s Newsletter lays out clearly all the ceremonies and masses to help us enter into this incredible drama of Salvation history. (Also on the website & Facebook) The ultimate sacrifice that Our Lord made on Good Friday was for our Salvation, to free us from the slavery of sin, and allow us to enter into the new life of grace!
I make an impassioned plea to all of you to share in the Sacred Triduum: Holy Thursday & the Mass of the Lord’s Supper; The Good Friday Passion of Our Lord, and the Easter Vigil. This is one continuous celebration with three different facets to it. Obviously the high point is the celebration of the Easter Vgil commencing at 8.00pm on 21st April 2019. This year I will be receiving Bibi Aghedo into full communion in the Roman Catholic Faith. Please pray for her. There will be a reception immediately after the Easter Vigil in the Parish Hall. If anyone would like to contribute some food for a finger buffett this would be very helpful, just drop it off at the parish hall before the Vigil commences. I really look forward to celebrating this Holy Week with you this year!
If you have never participated in the Triduum, this really is a wonderful time in the Church’s Liturgical Calandar. Or if you have not entered into the full–spirit of the Lenten Season, why not make a very special effort to join us for these three wonderful ceremonies. When we think of what Our Lord did for us, the least we can do is make a special effort to join with Him as he enters His Passion & Death, but also to rejoice with Him & in Him on his Day of Resurrection. I cannot stress enough the untold graces you will receive from God in participating in these sacred liturgies.
I earnestly encourage you all to participate fully in these most wonderful celebrations of the Lord’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection. As we begin our Holy Thursday celebration with the sign of the Cross it is important to remember that the next time we cross ourselves will be at the end of the Easter Vigil; the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, the Good Friday Liturgy, and the Easter Vigil, are one continuous celebration of Salvation History. 
Moral theologians speak of ‘sins of omission’, by which they mean the failure to act or speak out in a situation, causing those guilty of this offence to fall short of the goodness of God. Our Gospel today provides us with an example. In most modern translations of the Bible this passage is either dropped into the footnotes or placed in brackets to indicate that it did not form part of the original text. It is also missing from the oldest and best manuscripts for the Gospel of John. It is hard to figure out why and we can only speculate – perhaps a patriarchal culture and worldview rendered this beautiful incident in Jesus’ life too shocking and scandalous, revealing a depth of mercy and forgiveness which was unpalatable. We are grateful that this story, which was probably passed down by means of oral tradition, found its way into the can of Scripture.
and another was his last visit to Gethsemane. They were also with him when, as we read in the Gospel today, his human body was transfigured and glowed with divine life of a glorified and resurrected body. The disciples were granted, if you like, a glimpse of heaven. Peter, vividly recalled the event: ‘we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received 
The Scriptures identify Satan as the serpent in the Garden of Eden who tempted Adam and Eve, and therefore, as the origin of sin and temptation. What the Scriptures and tradition make clear is that humankind has a mortal enemy who, although a finite being created by God, is in a desperate struggle to overthrow God’s reign, usurp his Lordship and lead his creation into darkness and death. On Easter Sunday each of us will recite our Baptismal promises and in doing so renew them. Bear this in mind as we move through Lent, because as you will be aware, a renewal of our baptismal promises involves us actively, freely voluntarily rejecting Satan. 
Lent is also a time for us to discover anew and afresh the Gospel, the ‘Good News’, which Jesus began to proclaim immediately after his time of testing. What is the Good News? The Good News is a message of two parts. The first part is to repent and the second part is to believe in the Gospel. We walk together on this road marked out for us by the Church and take up our call to stand firm and resist the devil, and knowing that he will flee, and embrace freely and with love the Gospel, which is Christ with us and in us, the hope of Salvation.
This kind of love is not natural. It can come only with the grace of God and as a result of much work and effort. But this is precisely the challenge of today’s gospel for each one of us. To be so positive of all other people that we can accept them for who and what they are, that we can overcome those occasions when we tend to misjudge others, that we can stress the good in others and hope they can do the same for us.
It sounds like a kind of Christian utopia, doesn’t it? But Christ came to chan
This is contrast to the parallel found in Matthew’s Gospel, the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus’ words are addressed to both the disciples and to the crowds.
There are several similarities between Luke’s and Matthew’s report of Jesus’ great teaching. Both begin with the