Homily: Sacred Heart 240607
This solemnity of the Sacred Heart actually has well defined roots in the Cistercian tradition which has a strong devotion to the humanity of Jesus.
Perhaps it was to emphasize this devotion that the Latin choir books in Gethsemani Church years ago were adorned with a large bronze heart with a flame leaping out and the crown of thorns surrounding the image. As a novice my morning work assignment was dusting and polishing these books and their image. I am a bit embarrassed to admit that the many mornings dusting those large bronze hearts tried my devotion to the heart almost beyond human limits!
To focus our attention on one reality as symbol of the whole is a very human way to understand. In the case of devotion to the humanity of Jesus under the symbol of the heart may create understanding; but it may weaken the depth and breadth of the reality.
All of Our Lord’s attitudes towards us are unified and given life by his saving love in which the vocabulary and imagery of the heart can deepen our understanding. In theological thought, the heart and the love it indicates is also a revelation of the Holy Spirit. God gives us the free gift of his most intimate life, of his love, in the gift of the Holy Spirit. By that gift the love of God enters into history. The life, the child, which the Blessed Virgin Mary presented to the world, was born “of the Holy Spirit”.
God becomes one of us by the Holy Spirit. In becoming one of us, God accepts the reality of death which is the result of our sin. God dies a human death and experiences the power of the love of the Father in the resurrection. Jesus in accepting our death, as we must accept it, is the sign of the love of God for us. In Jesus we are shown that death is not final but is the way to share in the eternal life of God.
The symbol, the “heart”, cannot be reduced to only one natural component no matter how much effort Christian art has used to do just that. The heart is the center of the person. The love that gives unity and form to the Person of Christ is not just the human love of a person but it is the divine love; the Holy Spirit; the life of the Father and the Son. The love, this life of the Holy Spirit, has become human, so to speak, in the human love of Christ. The life of Jesus is this very life of God accepting the human reality of being sinful and so separated from God.
In so being present in our world, this love is saying that God accepts this world, God accepts us; each and every one of us. God’s answer to our sinfulness is not anger and condemnation but it is the response to the mystery of death that is the resurrection; that is life; that is his eternal life; that is the very life of God.
In a certain sense the celebration of the feast of the Heart of Jesus is to celebrate the whole mystery of life; the mystery of our relation to God and God’s relation to us. The only way that we can do this is to celebrate the Eucharist; to remember what the Lord did the night before he died; to eat his body and drink his life-giving blood; to have His Spirit as our life. As God in Jesus was one with our human life, so we living by His Spirit are one in the Divine life.