Beholding the Heart That Has So Much Loved Men, Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, June 24, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Francis de Sales Chapel
Archdiocese of Oklahoma City Pastoral Center
Retreat for the Sovereign Order of Malta
Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
June 24, 2022
Ez 34:11-16, Ps 23, Rom 5:5-11, Lk 15:3-7

To listen to an audio recording of tonight’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• When Peter DeKeratry wrote me last October seeing whether I would be available to come to preach a retreat for the Knights and Dames of Malta here in the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City June 24-26, 2022, I was very excited that the retreat would fittingly begin on June 24, the day the Church each year celebrates the Birth of Saint John the Baptist, the patron of the Sovereign Military and Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and Malta. Neither he nor I had looked ahead at the liturgical calendar and the rare occurrence that the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which takes place on the Friday after Corpus Christi Sunday, would likewise fall on June 24. Because the Solemnities of the Lord Jesus take precedence over the Solemnities of the saints, the Church, as you know, moved the celebration of the birth of St. John the Baptist to yesterday. But I think St. John the Baptist is smiling. In life the Precursor to the Lord’s birth, time in the desert, preaching and death, humbly and proudly said about Jesus, “He must increase; I must decrease” (Jn 3:30). His whole life was to point to Jesus and say, “Behold the Lamb of God!” And he would be very happy, as his birthday present, to cede June 24 to the cousin and Lord whom he loved and to whom he wants to lead all those who look to him as patron. And so tonight we behold the Lamb of God together with John as that Lamb points to his heart and says to us, as he said to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in June of 1675, “Behold the Heart that has so much loved men.”
• The Sacred Heart of Jesus, as Pope Benedict in a 2008 Sunday Angelus greeting, is the “center of the faith.” That might seem a little overstated, if we erroneously understand devotion to the Sacred Heart as something that basically began in the 1670s with St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. Pope Benedict, however, understood it far more broadly: The Heart of Christ, he declared, “expresses in a simple and authentic way the ‘glad tidings’ of love, summarizing the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption in itself. … God desired to enter into the limits of history and the human condition. He took on a body and a heart; thus we can contemplate and meet the infinite in the finite.” Benedict called every person to find his or her “center” in Jesus’ Sacred Heart, which he poetically said constitutes a “source of truth and goodness from which to draw in the flux of the different situations of everyday life and its toil. Everyone of us, when he pauses for a moment of silence, needs to feel not only the beating of his own heart, but more deeply, the beating of a trustworthy presence, perceptible to the senses of faith and yet more real: the presence of Christ, the heart of the world.”
• Tonight many of us begin a retreat focused on the Eucharistic Jesus as the Heart of the Church’s Charity. We will be pondering together how to grow in Eucharistic faith, amazement, love and life. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council taught that the Eucharistic Jesus is the source, summit, root and center of the Church’s faith and life. And so we have to ask: how is it simultanteously true that the Sacred Heart of Jesus is the “center of our faith” and the Eucharist is the center, root, source and summit of the faith? It’s because Jesus himself connects his Real Presence in the Eucharist to devotion to His Sacred Heart.  Not only did three major revelations of Christ to St. Margaret Mary in the 17th century take place in connection to the Holy Eucharist — twice in Eucharistic adoration and once while she was preparing to receive Holy Communion — but devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is devotion to the mystery of Christ’s human and divine love, which led Jesus to give his Body and Blood for us on Calvary and to continue to give that Body and Blood to us on the altar. We will get to Jesus’ words emphasizing the connection between his Sacred Heart and his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity on the altar shortly, but I would like first to examine what the Word of God the Church gives us today reveals about the divine and human love revealed on the altar and by Jesus’ heart aflame.
• In the Gospel, Jesus gives us a parable illustrating how each of us is worth his love, how he readily leaves the 99 others to come after us and rejoices to have his back. St. Paul tells us in his Letter to the Romans that “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” This is the love he had promised through the Prophet Ezekiel in the first reading when he said he himself would rescue us from every place where he were scattered, gathering us from foreign lands, pasturing us on mountain heights. He sums this all up in the Psalm where we’re reminded that with him as our Shepherd we lack for nothing as he leads us to verdant pastures and overflowing cups where he gives us repose.
• All of this love, which is the center of our faith, is symbolized in the Eucharist and by the Sacred Heart. It’s always struck me as noteworthy that we don’t have a feast of Jesus’ sacred brain, even though Jesus is the eternal logos. We don’t honor his hallowed hands, which, in spite of calluses from hard work in a hidden Nazarene carpentry shop, brought a tender healing touch to so many. There’s no commemoration of the Lord’s consecrated feet, which traversed the ancient holy land as he announced the Good News from town to town. There’s no liturgical observation of Jesus’ blessed eyes, which looked on the rich young man with love and were so powerful that, with one glance, they could make Peter weep in the high priest’s courtyard. There’s no festival of his venerable voice, which amplified the word of God made man. While there would be a certain fittingness to honoring all of these parts of Jesus’ sacred anatomy — especially since his head was crowned with thorns, his hands and feet pierced by nails, his eyes bruised and beaten and his voice thoroughly parched on Good Friday out of love for us — Jesus has never asked that we do so. Rather, when he began to appear to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in 1673, he did so to request that a feast be instituted to honor him under the image and reality of his Sacred Heart. The Lord’s reason for choosing his heart will always remain, in some way, a great and beautiful mystery, but even with our limited human intellects we know that, according to the language and imagery of the Bible, the heart has always been considered the center of the person, the point where reason, will and emotions converge, the place where one finds his inner unity and direction. To honor Jesus’ heart means that we give homage to his entire sacred humanity, conscious that Jesus took our own nature to offer it for us, to redeem it, and to make it the sacred dwelling place of God once again. To honor his heart means that we want our humanity to be transformed by his, so that we may come fully alive and thereby give God glory. Moreover, one doesn’t have to be a poet to grasp that the heart is the bodily organ that most effectively symbolizes love. To adore Jesus’ heart is to venerate his great love for us. When Jesus appeared to St. Margaret Mary, he exposed his heart and she saw it engulfed in flames, a visible sign of the passion with which he burns with love of us. Twice during the Last Supper, Jesus said that he loves us as much as the Father loves him (Jn 13:34; Jn 15:13) and, just like the Father’s love for him, Jesus’ love for us has no limits. Jesus himself revealed this to St. Margaret Mary when she saw his exposed, ardent heart also surrounded by a crown of thorns. No one has greater love, Jesus said, than to lay down his life for his friends, and the crown of thorns in the midst of the flames enveloping his heart is a sign of just how much suffering Jesus out of love for us was willing to bear. That’s the direction of Jesus’ heart, where his treasure is: in loving us with his mercy, in seeking to make our hearts like unto his.
• Because Jesus has a human heart, however, that heart can be broken, and it has been — and not just when it was pierced with a lance upon Calvary. Whenever we fail to align our heart and treasure with the love that beats in his heart for us, whenever we fail to receive his love or to love others as he has loved us first, his heart is wounded. Jesus is not stoically indifferent to that rejection, but feels our unrequited love in the depth of his human heart and divine and human love. Jesus told St. Margaret Mary as much in 1675. Pointing to his heart, he said to her, “Behold the heart that has so much loved men that it has spared nothing, even exhausting and consuming itself in testimony of its love. In recognition, I receive from most only ingratitude, by their irreverence and sacrilege, and by the coldness and scorn they have for me in this Sacrament of Love.” Jesus refers to His Presence in the Eucharist as the “Sacrament of Love,” the efficacious sign of his divine and human love for us. Jesus went on, “What I feel the most keenly is that it is hearts that are consecrated to me that treat me in this way.” And by this he was not simply referring to priests and religious who take the loves he shows us in the Eucharist for granted but to all those who have been consecrated to him in Baptism.
• Jesus candidly laments that his self-giving love is unrequited. He spared nothing, exhausting and consuming himself to show us how much he loved us, taking on our nature, putting up patiently with us as his creatures, even allowing us to persecute, mock, torture and crucify him, and then going so far as to give us himself under the appearance of bread and wine as our spiritual nourishment. In response, he says he receives from most, including those consecrated to him, only ingratitude, irreverence, sacrilege, coldness and scorn. Such words should pierce anyone who truly loves the Lord. But they also provide a path of reparation and love. The words Jesus gives us reveal what he would like to see from us with regard to his Eucharistic outpouring, namely, the reverse of what he bemoans, each of which should become a touchstone of the Eucharistic Revival the Church in the U.S. began five days ago. In response to “most” treating him in the “sacrament of love” with ingratitude, we ought to approach the Eucharistic Jesus with unceasing thanks. In response to “most” who treat him with irreverence, who just go through the motions or who even pray Mass poorly as if it doesn’t matter, he wants us to treat him with deep piety. In contrast to “most” who relate to him with coldness and lack of enthusiasm, who approach him at Mass or in tabernacles and monstrances as bored and distracted spectators rather than ardent participants, he wants us more passionate about him at the Mass than the most fanatical sports fans are during a successful playoff run. Instead of treating him with scorn, he wants us to relate to him with praise and blessing. And rather than receiving him sacrilegiously, without being in the state of grace, he wants us to receive him with souls fully intent on holiness and cleansed of sin. Those of us, moreover, who are consecrated to him have, in a sense, a duty to make reparation for all of those who treat Jesus poorly. If he feels most keenly the lack of love from those who are consecrated, then how much more consoling will be the love of those who are conscious of their special dedication. The best way we train to do so is by receiving Jesus in the Eucharist with gratitude, piety, passion, praise and purity — in short, by treating him as he deserves.
• Jesus asked St. Margaret Mary to begin that reparation and renewed love, inviting her to take St. John’s place during the celebration of the Mass, to rest her head on his heart and, not only sense his love, but share in it. She felt the Lord take her heart, put it within his own, and return it burning with divine love into her breast, so that her heart, like his, might become a “burning furnace of charity.” Jesus wants, in essence, through the Mass to give us the same type of transplant. He wants us to rest our heart on his as he celebrates in the Upper Room and to receive from him his own heart so that we might love God and others as he loves us. Through the prophet Ezekiel, God had prophesied, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek 36:24). He said he would do this first by “sprinkling clean water” upon us to “cleanse [us] from all [our] uncleanness” (v. 25), which is what happens in the sacrament of baptism. But that was just “pre-operative” preparation for what the Lord wishes to do in the Eucharist. When Pope Paul VI in 1970 authorized doctors to examine, with state of the art techniques, the almost 1300-year-old Eucharistic miracle of Lanciano, Italy, we were able to get a glimpse of the connection between the Eucharist and the Sacred Heart. The doctors determined that the consecrated priest’s host that had turned into flesh right after the words of consecration was actually human heart wall (myocardium), cut in a cross section that would be impossible to make even with present day tools. In working such a miracle, the Lord obviously could have taken on the composition of any human body part, but chose the texture of the human heart, not simply because he was giving us the fullness of his love in this sacrament, but he was also giving us his heart so that we might be able to love like him. Because of the connection, it’s also easy to see, in retrospect, why the Lord, through St. Margaret Mary, asked that the feast of his Sacred Heart be celebrated on Friday right after Corpus Christi and to venerate his heart by receiving Holy Communion on first Fridays. In the Eucharist, Jesus gives us a heart transplant, so that we might not just worship his sacred heart but receive from him a sacred heart in return. The Mass is how Jesus fulfills the prayer Catholics have lifted up for centuries: “O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make our hearts like unto thine!”
• Earlier today we prayed at before the relics of Blessed Stanley Rother, who is a model for us of how this Eucharistic transformation of our hearts is meant through us to change the world. When Pope Francis’ Apostolic Letter of beatification was read in Latin at the Cox Convention Center by Cardinal Angelo Amato, then Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation of Saints, the Holy Father called him a missionarius secundum cor Christi, “a missionary according to the heart of Christ.” That heart, purified and inflamed by Christ’s Sacred Heart, was removed from his martyred remains and rests in Santiago Atitlàn, where Christ’s love poured out through him for the Guatemalan people. On the day he was killed, as Cardinal Amato reminded us, he was scheduled to go to the hospital to give blood for a parishioner who needed an operation. Little did he expect how he would become a blood donor that day! And when the metal reliquary containing his heart was disinterred in Santiago Atitlàn to be moved to an altar, people were shocked to find that his blood was mysteriously still “fresh” 36 years after his death. The priesthood, St. John Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests once said, “is the love of the heart of Jesus,” and we see that love, both human and divine, in the life outpoured by the most famous Catholic in the history of Oklahoma, whose Christ-like, Eucharistic, priestly life was a commentary on Jesus’ words, “This is my blood poured out for you.”
• Tonight as we celebrate Mass and prepare for the heart transplant Jesus seeks to give us through Holy Communion, we ask him to work in us the miracle he worked in Saint Margaret Mary and the one whom the Catholics in the Tz’utujil language of Santiago Atitlán called Padre A’Plas or “Father Francisco” and make our heart like unto his. We ask them both to intercede for us that what Archbishop Coakley will pray in the Eucharistic Preface in just a few minutes will take place in and through us. “Raised up high on the Cross,” the Church prays, Jesus “gave himself up for us with a wonderful love and poured out blood and water from his pierced side, the wellspring of the Church’s Sacraments, so that, won over to the open heart of the Savior, all might draw water joyfully from the springs of salvation.” Today John the Baptist points us to that brimming heart of Jesus, the Lamb of God, say that we may draw and drink water with joy, the water that renews us in the graces of baptism, the water that flows together with Eucharist blood from his pierced side, the water that Christ through this sacrament of charity wants to well up within us to eternal life. Let us respond with the gratitude, reverence, passion, purity and praise Christ’s divine and human love deserve!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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