MEDFORD -- Jesus peeked out from behind the closed curtains to see the hundreds of chattering students of St. Raphael School in Medford who had filled the parish hall to watch his passion.

Jesus was Jeremiah Quattrini, a seventh grader at St. Raphael's. On Holy Thursday, April 17, he and his classmates performed a tableau vivant passion play for the school, continuing a tradition that has lasted over 25 years.

"Thank you so much for coming," Cindy Gately, English teacher at St. Raphael's, told the 238 pre-K-to-eighth-grade students in the audience at the start of the show. "Now we all know this is a story of Jesus's last journey on Earth. It's very serious, very holy. So we just watch, and we listen, and the seventh graders have worked so hard."

The play has no dialogue or action. Rather, the seventh graders arrange themselves in a series of still scenes representing the Stations of the Cross. Gately has been in charge of the passion play for almost all of its history.

"Absolutely fabulous," she told The Pilot. "I know a lot of people think middle schoolers could never take anything serious or step up to the plate and realize the importance of presenting themselves in their best light. And the message that they share is beautiful, and they're wonderful, and when they make their parents and parishioners and teachers cry when they watch the presentation, you know they've touched all their hearts."

The seventh graders each chose their top three favorite parts to play. Jeremiah isn't sure why he was drawn to playing the role of Jesus. It was his first role on stage since "Mary Had a Little Lamb" when he was in third or fourth grade. After the show and still in costume, he high-fived some of the younger students and took one final bow before heading back into the dressing room.

"We originally studied all the stations and what they were in order," he said. "And then we rehearsed them one by one."

The seventh graders each kept a Way of the Cross journal where they wrote down what they thought Jesus would be feeling during each station.

"I thought, 'What would Jesus do in the moment?'" Jeremiah said. "And I rehearsed what he would have done."

The role required him to put himself in Jesus's shoes.

"It taught me what Jesus had to go through for us, and how he sacrificed himself for us," he said.

Mary Logan sang the hymn "Were You There?" during the play. She saw Christ's passions as simply something she learned about in school until she took part in the performance.

"When we started practicing, it felt routine, but today it felt a lot more real," she said.

It was the first stage appearance of Marco Sirignano, who played Pontius Pilate. He said he was nervous, "but it was a serious enough topic that I stayed calm."

"It made you really think about what it was like to be there at the time, and how sad it must have been, and how he just wanted to make people happy," he said.

Emma Ostroski, who played Mary, is used to being on stage. She previously played the part in her first grade Christmas pageant.

"I really thought about each station and what it meant for Mary to see her son like that," she said.

Emma's onstage performances tend to have a lot more motion. Outside of school, she's a competitive dancer.

"It was hard not to move while the curtain was open," she said, "but I thought about everything that they went through to help me be still."