The Center of Our Faith, Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, June 28, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
June 28, 2019
Ez 34:11-16, Ps 23, Rom 5:5-11, Lk 15:3-7

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Pope Benedict in a 2008 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 emphasize the love at the heart of the mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption. 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 promises through the Prophet Ezekiel 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 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 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. 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’ 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!”
• Today as we celebrate Mass and prepare for that heart transplant, we ask Jesus for the grace to treat him with precedence, piety, passion, praise and purity. The Preface we will pray in a few minutes summarizes everything this feast is about, everything that I’ve tried to preach today: “Raised up high on the Cross, [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.” Here, won over, we draw that water with joy from his brimming heart!

The readings for today’s Mass were: