23/06/2022
This day, JUNE 24, we celebrate with the entire UNIVERSAL CHURCH the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a celebration fixed on a Friday after the Corpus Christi.
Catholics are very familiar with the Church’s devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the heart of her who was never touched by any sin, but rather is full of grace. Jesus, too, of course, sharing in the divinity of His Father, is sinless, and so we could speak of and celebrate the Immaculate Heart of Jesus. But today we are celebrating instead the “Sacred Heart” of Jesus.
To be “sacred” means “to be set aside for a special purpose.” What, then, is the purpose of Jesus’ heart? The heart is obviously a human element of who Jesus is. It certainly expresses the love of God the Son, for as Saint John the Divine tells us, God is love. As God, in his divinity, the Son of course has no physical heart—we can say only that the Godhead possesses a heart in a metaphorical sense—but in His humanity Jesus of course possesses a heart, beating within His Body, pumping His life-blood to all its parts.
What does it mean then to say that Jesus, as human, has a heart? It means that He is capable of suffering. To have a heart means to be able to be broken, to be weak, to be vulnerable. This is the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ’s love: that He would carry a Cross and die upon it for us, in order to open the gates of Heaven for our darkened, sinful hearts.
This is the special purpose of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the reason for the Incarnation. This is what Jesus’ heart was set aside for: that it would be broken, that it would be pierced. But far be it from us to simply worship the image of the Sacred Heart as an image to be given thanks. The Sacred Heart is a person to be imitated.
We do not celebrate the feast of “the Sacred Intellect of Jesus”. Nor do we celebrate the feast of “the Sacred Memory.” We celebrate the “Sacred Heart” because the greatest of the capacities of God and man is the capacity to will, to choose, and God’s will always chooses love, because God is love, and because love consists in this: not that we have loved God, but that He has loved us, and has sent His Son as an offering for our sins.
The Sacred Heart is a person to be imitated. The heart pumps blood to the entire body, and as His Mystical Body’s members we share in that life-blood as we share in the offering for our sins that Christ sacrificed on the Cross and memorialized sacramentally at His Last Supper. This sacred meal is “set aside”: its purpose is our sanctification, that our hearts might become more capable of being broken for the salvation of others, and attain to the fullness of Love, Who is God Himself.
