Dear Parents and Carers of Good Samaritan,

Jesus was a deeply human person. He lived in a time when life was both simple and complex. To many of us today life just doesn’t seem that way. Often we can long for the days when life was a little ‘easier’, when it was ‘like the good old days’. For us, as adults,  those days seem to have all passed. What we do have though is the many stories of Jesus as he lived his life and the deep humanity he displayed has impacted upon our world over time. For example, over the weekend we heard the Gospel of Matthew as he recounts Jesus teaching the crowds the Beatitudes or what we know as the ‘Sermon on the Mount.”

The Church of the Beatitudes sits atop a hill just as Luke describes and Jesus made use of the natural environment around him. The hill, or the ‘mount’, is where the crowds gathered and this area is a natural ampitheatre so we can now understand that Jesus would have been at the bottom of this hill whilst the people would have been on the mount. Using the natural acoustics of the area Jesus’ teaching would have easily been heard by all who were there.

So, it was here that Jesus contrasted the teaching that came through Moses in the Ten Commandments. The commandments were the law of what to do and what not to do, or the ‘wrongs’ to avoid in life. Whereas the Beatitudes teach about the transformation of the inner person. Recently, Pope Francis spoke about the ‘new beatitudes’. He said that as Christian saints have done throughout the ages, Christ's followers today are called "to confront the troubles and anxieties of our age with the spirit and love of Jesus."

New situations require new energy and a new commitment, he said, and then he offered a new list of beatitudes for modern Christians:

• "Blessed are those who remain faithful while enduring evils inflicted on them by others and forgive them from their heart.
• "Blessed are those who look into the eyes of the abandoned and marginalized and show them their closeness.
• "Blessed are those who see God in every person and strive to make others also discover him.
• "Blessed are those who protect and care for our common home.
• "Blessed are those who renounce their own comfort in order to help others.
• "Blessed are those who pray and work for full communion between Christians."

So as we enter this new year we remind ourselves of the new energy and new commitment that we must give in order to receive the blessings that we strive for in our lives. Our children deserve this as our example of how to live.

Journeying together with Jesus,

Toni Sillis

Principal