Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Agnes Church, New York, NY
External Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus in the 1962 Roman Missal
June 10, 2018
Eph 3:8-12.14-19, Jn 19:31-37
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided today’s homily:
In the rubrics of the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, it gives the priest the option, for the good of the faithful, to celebrate on Sunday what is called the “external solemnity” of feasts that occur during the week (Rubricae Generales Missalis Romani, 356-361), and so today we are celebrating the External Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, which the Church universal celebrated, we know, on Friday.
A decade ago, Pope Benedict in a Sunday Angelus greeting, said that devotion to the Sacred Heart is the “center of the faith.” That might seem a little overstated, if we 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 stated, “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 “center” in Jesus’ Sacred Heart, which he poetically says constitutes a “source of truth and goodness to draw from 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.”
Today’s readings from the word of God focus on that “center of our faith.” In the Epistle of St. Paul to the Ephesians, he describes God’s love that summarizes the mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption. The “inscrutable riches of Christ,” the “mystery hidden from ages past,” the “eternal purpose… accomplished in Christ Jesus,” was that each of us be “strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner self, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith” and that “Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” God wants us to know his love and rooted in it, grounded in it, filled with it. That love is symbolized by Jesus’ Sacred Heart.
In order to help us recognize God’s love and begin to receive it — the center of our faith” — we need to contemplate it. That’s what today’s Gospel is meant to help us to do. On Calvary, Jesus’ heart was pierced by a lance and from it “immediately blood and water flowed out,” the contents of heart. That water and blood symbolize how God wants to infuse us with the love of his heart. That begins by creating the conditions for us to “look upon him whom they have pierced,” to look on Christ’s outpouring love, taking upon him our sins and paying the price of our redemption. We need to behold Christ’s pierced side, his Sacred Heart, continuously. This is what the Church had done for centuries before Jesus appeared to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, pondering in a particular way John the beloved disciple’s resting on Christ’s heart in the Last Supper, a thought that permeated St. Francis de Sales’ Treatise on the Love of God, St. John Eudes’ preaching about Jesus’ heart and more.
But it’s not enough for us merely to behold the one we have pierced and see his outpouring love. When Pope Pius XII wrote his encyclical on the Sacred Heart, he entitled it, “Haurietis Aquas,” from the Isaiah 12, “You will draw water joyfully from the streams of salvation,” because Jesus’ pierced side, his open heart, is the “fountain of salvation,” from which flows Him who is the Living Water and the Precious Blood that is more precious than the blood of Abel, one drop of which is enough to save the whole world. To behold Christ’s side and to draw water and blood from it is to receive Christ’s love and allow it to hydrate and inebriate us from within, so that Christ’s love can fill us to overflowing. In all of these ways, we can see how the Mystery of the Sacred Heart is at the center of our faith.
And Jesus wanted us to do this, which is what’s behind his taking these truths of faith and making them devotional. So often devotion to the Sacred Heart has been impacted by the ugly statues with terrible saccharine “make-up” all over Jesus that makes the world’s most attractive person ever look so unappealing. The paint jobs on the Statue of the Sacred Heart are perhaps the worst on any figure of all time! It’s almost as if someone gave a bunch of jocks from the football team some make-up and paint and told them to decorate a statue of Jesus. I much prefer Pompeo Batoni’s image of the Sacred Heart at the Gesù Church in Rome, which the Jesuits have taken throughout the world, which at least shows a realistic Jesus offering us his heart on fire.But frankly no image will ever be able to do Jesus or his heart justice. On this external solemnity, therefore, we ought to ponder these realities at the center of our faith with the devotion more of the heart than of the eyes.
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 can come up with at least two partial explanations why. First, 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 in order to offer it for us, redeem it, and 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. Second, 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 burnswith 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’ 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 the Cross. Whenever we fail to align our heart and treasure with the love that beats in his heart for us, his heart is wounded. Jesus is not stoically indifferent to our 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. Instead of gratitude, I receive from most only indifference, irreverence, sacrilege, coldness and scorn that men have for me in the sacrament of love,” Jesus’ expression for the gift of himself in the Eucharist. If that wasn’t enough, he 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. He gives us himself not just every Sunday but every day of the year, but is our heart set on this gift, on the love with which Jesus constantly exhausts and consumes himself in love for us?”
In response to “most” treating him in the “sacrament of love” with indifference by missing Mass as if it makes no difference, Jesus wants us to make him wants us to treat him in the Mass as the greatest difference-maker in our life, as our true priority, as the “source and summit” of our existence, the fulcrum of our week and day. 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 come to Mass 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 grateful appreciation. 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 precedence, piety, passion, praise and purity — in short, by treating him as he deserves.
Jesus asked St. Margaret Mary to begin the reparation, 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!”
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A Reading for the Epistle of St. Paul to the Ephesians
Brethren, to me, the very least of all the holy ones, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the inscrutable riches of Christ, and to bring to light [for all] what is the plan of the mystery hidden from ages past in God who created all things, so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the principalities and authorities in the heavens. This was according to the eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness of speech and confidence of access through faith in him. For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that he may grant you in accord with the riches of his glory to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner self, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
The Continuation of the Holy Gospel according to St. John
At that time, since it was preparation day, in order that the bodies might not remain on the cross on the sabbath, for the sabbath day of that week was a solemn one, the Jews asked Pilate that their legs be broken and they be taken down. So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and then of the other one who was crucified with Jesus. But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs, but one soldier thrust his lance into his side, and immediately blood and water flowed out. An eyewitness has testified, and his testimony is true; he knows that he is speaking the truth, so that you also may [come to] believe. For this happened so that the scripture passage might be fulfilled: “Not a bone of it will be broken.” And again another passage says: “They will look upon him whom they have pierced.”
