The solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus was celebrated in the place of the 10th Sunday per annum.
What if you stopped loving your spouse? What if that love you once had for the person you married disappeared - not matured from the excesses of youth or transformed over time, but quite simply disappeared? What might your spouse do to change that? Would they do anything? What might you do? Would you do anything? Would you claim that a marriage where one spouse has zero love of the other to be a fruitful marriage? These are the questions that form the background to the feast we celebrate today, for they relate to the problem lying at the heart of the matter.
In the late 17th century, a young French girl joined the Sisters of the Visitation. She was not particularly gifted nor was she famous at that point, but Margaret Mary Alacoque would go on to herald a movement that stems from Christ Himself. While she was at prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, the sister received a vision of Jesus with His Heart aflame with love. At one point among the visions that St Margaret Mary would receive, Jesus would come to her and formally display His Sacred Heart making this bold statement:
Behold the Heart which has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming Itself, in order to testify Its love; and in return, I receive from the greater part only ingratitude, by their irreverence and sacrilege, and by the coldness and contempt they have for Me in this Sacrament of Love.
This is the great mystery at the heart of the Feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. For in this feast we venerate that organ most representative of the two greatest loves known in the universe: the divine love that is shown for each individual human being, and the love of the God-man, both human and divine, that was so loving of all that He would willingly undergo the cruel sufferings of His passion and even to die on the Cross rather than lose one of those whom He loves. But this feast is meant not merely to commemorate that love, but to seek to inflame the hearts of all so as to return to that Sacred Heart the love that is due to It.
What Our Lord lamented most in the revelations to St Margaret Mary was the coldness and distance that He encountered not merely in all souls, but in particular those who should know better. I fear that He may mean those of us who are the faithful in the Church, those of us who are the regulars. Jesus is chiding us for our lack of love, for returning to Him as much as possible that love He has shown for us.
I cannot speak for each one of you in this instance, but I can speak for myself. I, as a priest of Jesus Christ and His Church, can be far more loving and far more faithful than am I now. I know it is true, I know it is possible, and I know that if only I accepted this and tried to take the first step, Jesus would pour forth from that loving Heart every gift and every grace necessary for me to advance. Yet I don’t do this. Why not? Because, if I am honest with myself, I am satisfied with where I am now.
Perhaps this may be the case with you. Perhaps you are satisfied with what your relationship with Jesus looks like at this moment. But our feast today reveals to us that Jesus disagrees with us. A common saying heard about the spiritual life is that if you’re not moving forward, you’re going backward. It’s not that Jesus makes this hard for us; it’s that there are so many things that turn us away from Him that we have to either fight them off or transform them into our daily encounters with Christ. But we must make the first step.
Jesus offers us everything we need to be holy, to be what the Trinity created us to be originally: the holy people of God, the adopted sons of God the Father, the brothers and sisters of God the Son, the temples of God the Holy Spirit. He even gives us His very flesh and blood in the Holy Eucharist so that we may become what we receive. But if we do not let any of this have an effect on us, if it does not transform us into being more holy and desiring greater unity with God every day, then it fails us, and we fail the Sacred Heart. The Catholic religion is not a workplace where you punch your work ticket once a week and on the special days and then get what you are owed. The Catholic religion is focused on restoring each one of us back to that intimate loving relationship God desires to have with us, individually and as a community, as a church.
May the Sacred Heart transform each one of us to be more than we have been to this point. Let us not waste the call of the Sacred Heart to be inflamed and purified by His love to be what we were meant to be. Let us not continue in the ways we have conducted ourselves up to this point, however good they may be. Let us strive for greater, let us in fact strive for greatness. Let us begin to take up this devotion to the Sacred Heart as a means of transforming our lives to be Christ-centered and Christ-driven. Let us abandon our former ways and be reconciled to God through the sufferings of the Sacred Heart that have won for us that same reconciliation. Let us be ignited by the ardent love of Christ so as to be bearers of that love to others in our daily lives. Let every moment be turned upside down so that it may be rightly oriented to that Heart which desires us to love as He loves, so that we may be immersed in that love both now and in the eternal dwellings of that love that await the fervent in Heaven.
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