The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus
How does the human brain wrap itself around the eternal and infinite love of God for His creation? How can can we even begin to comprehend the depth of love in Christ’s wounded heart as he pours Himself out for us poor sinners at Calvary?
The truth is, we can’t. The saints and the mystics may catch glimpses, but we humans see all things divine, as Saint Paul said, through a glass darkly (cf. 1 Corinthians 13).
Fortunately, those saints and mystics have given us a wonderful point of focus for the “wonders of His love” – the Sacred Heart. The old Catholic Encyclopedia has an exhaustive article on the meaning of the devotion. The crux (if you will pardon the pun) is something like this:
[W]orship … although directed to the material Heart … does not stop there: it also includes love, that love which is its principal object, but which it reaches only in and through the Heart of flesh, the sign and symbol of this love. …
Hence, in the devotion, there are two elements: a sensible element, the Heart of flesh, and a spiritual element, that which this Heart of flesh recalls and represents.
In other words: humans, being physical creatures, can most easily understand and focus on physical things in our quest to understand the spiritual. Devotion to the physical “fleshy” Heart of Jesus inexorably leads us to true contemplation of the Sacred Heart, the source of His overflowing love.
Iglesia de San Francisco, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 2022.
Since God is love (1 John 4:8), devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus must ultimately bring us to closer devotion of the totality of God. As Jesus is both true man and true God, so must His Sacred Heart must encompass both the cardiac muscle in His chest and the totality of His divine love.
There’s something else here, though. The Sacred Heart of Jesus is a wounded heart, a broken heart, a heart that comprehends all of our emotional hurt and transforms it on Calvary to a sacrifice pleasing to God the Father.
Come, let us adore Christ’s Sacred Heart, wounded for love of us.
(Invitatory Antiphon, Office of Readings for the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart)
We are healed in that love.
Today on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, it would be a good time to remind ourselves of the infinite love He bears for His poor creatures, perhaps by use of one of the traditional prayers or something like it.
O Sacred Heart of Jesus, pour out Your benedictions upon Your Holy Church, upon Your priests, and upon all Your children. Sustain the just, convert the sinners, assist the dying, deliver the souls in purgatory, and extend over all hearts the sweet empire of Your love. Amen.
It should be obvious that the devotion to the Sacred Heart is similar to the devotion to the Divine Mercy, which I have discussed several times previously.
They are two sides of the same coin. Indeed, we have this picture here on the left hanging in our dining room, which combines the two into a single, powerful image. Many parishes have the image of Divine Mercy hanging above a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
For the Divine love of the Sacred Heart is the Divine Mercy:
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life (John 3:16).
Holy Rosary Church, Tacoma, 2015
In addition to being the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Saint John Paul II established that on this day the Church observes the World Day of Prayer for the Sanctification of Priests.
We strongly encourage each and every one of the faithful … to pray for our priests, today, this day this very moment … through prayer, celebration of the Mass and Eucharistic Adoration.
It seems appropriate that on this Solemnity we should take a moment to pray for all our priests, and perhaps especially for our past and future pastors in this time of parish transition.
Prayer for Priests
Saint Thérèse of LisieuxO Holy Father, may the torrents of love flowing from the sacred wounds of your divine Son bring forth priests like unto the beloved disciple John who stood at the foot of the cross; priests, who as a pledge of your own most tender love will lovingly give your divine Son to the souls of men.
May your priests be faithful guardians of your Church, as John was of Mary, whom he received into his house. Taught by this loving Mother who suffered so much on Calvary, may they display a mother’s care and thoughtfulness towards your children. May they teach souls to enter into close union with you through Mary who, as the Gate of Heaven, is specially the guardian of the treasures of your divine Heart.
Give us priests who are on fire, and who are true children of Mary, priests who will give Jesus to souls with the same tenderness and care with which Mary carried the Little Child of Bethlehem.
Mother of sorrows and of love, out of compassion for your beloved Son, open in our hearts deep wells of love, so that we may console Him and give Him a generation of priests formed in your school and having all the tender thoughtfulness of your own spotless love.
Amen.
I read these posts with respect and a desire to understand, and thank
you for writing them. But there is so much I don’t get. ‘The Sacred Heart of Jesus is a heart … that comprehends all of our emotional hurt and transforms it on Calvary to a sacrifice pleasing to God the Father.’ Why does God the father want a sacrifice at all, never mind a sacrifice made from transformed pain? What is the pain transformed into that pleases God? Surrender? Obedience? Love? Is it a desire for mortals to take the worst and make from it the best? I appreciate that you are busy and may not have time to answer, and anyway, writing here does feel like I am entering a cloister, your meditative place. So no worries if providing an answer is too much weight.
Thank you so much, Debbie, for the questions. I’m not quite sure how to answer them specifically without taking a slight step back to look at more of the whole picture. Apologies for length!
The whole subject is related to that of the atonement, which is deep theological waters, and mostly above my pay grade. There have been countless reflections and books written on the subject over the course of 2,000 years, and the theories of exactly how this worked and why is the subject of endless theological debate, some of which strays into crazy-heresy territory.
For more on this, you could do worse than to start here: https://www.sdmorrison.org/7-theories-of-the-atonement-summarized/
On this list, I suppose that during my reflections I was speaking in the poetic language of Saint Anselm’s theory on the Atonement, though I think that this should be seen as a corollary to the classic, or “Christus Victor”, theory, which I believe was confirmed at the Council of Trent.
But it comes down to this (and at the risk of swerving into dangerous waters myself):
God deigned to become human for many reasons, among these was to be in solidarity with us. As Saint Paul says when he writes to the Hebrews (Heb. 4:15) “For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sinning.”
In His very life – and suffering and death – God was fully human in the person of Jesus, while however also remaining fully divine.
And what was the response of the humans living at the time? Torture and kill Him. Typical of us, really.
At Gethsemane and on the Cross, He offered those sufferings to the Father as an oblation, in imitation of the paschal lambs – without blemish and without spot – that the Jews offered on the altars of sacrifice every Passover. If the ritual slaughter of the lambs was both in remembrance and thanksgiving of the mighty deeds of God for the Jewish people as well as an expiation of sin, how much more the ultimately spotless lamb that is the Son of God Himself?
In other words, if we were going to torture and kill Him, He would at least make it mean something. Does God Himself require sacrifice? No:
Nonetheless, the Lord knew what we would do; He endured it regardless and transformed the horror we perpetrated into something wondrous.
Saint Paul tells us what happens next in his letter to the Colossians: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church…” (Colossians 1:24)
What could possibly be “lacking in Christ’s afflictions”? Well, what’s the one thing missing on the Cross? Me. My sufferings.
Everybody suffers. And those sufferings are largely meaningless – unless we give them meaning, unless we spiritually unite our own individual sufferings to those of God on the Cross. Then, suddenly, they mean something. They are part of that great oblation, wherein God Himself, though Human, offers those sufferings as sacrifice.
Saint Paul in his letter goes on to say that he’s offering his own sufferings for something specific, for the sake of the Church. So that’s kind of our blueprint.
Without this, suffering and pain are largely without meaning. I was particularly struck by this recently when speaking with a friend whose spouse had been diagnosed with cancer. My friend is an atheist, and so of course none of the tools that Christians have for coping with suffering are going to be useful for me to propose. All I could do was express my sorrow and sympathy (and of course, pray for them, though again that would have comforted my friend not at all).
It’s not that God demands – or necessarily reduces – our human suffering, but He offers us a tool for helping us to deal with them.
God does not demand suffering. But we’re human, dealing with a broken world full of broken humans, many of whom seem to enjoy passing on their suffering to their fellow humans.
What God does is embrace that suffering and transform it through love.
I honestly don’t know if any of that makes any sense, but I hope at least that I gave you the shape of it.
You have give me a great deal to consider. I won’t say that I understand quite, but that is because I have not mulled upon your words long. I will do, though. Thank you for taking your time to give me such a well thought out answer.
You are most welcome!