Feast of the Sacred Heart, 27 June 2025 (Year C)
Ezekiel 34:11-16; Romans 5:5-11; Luke 15:3-7
H O M E L Y.
The aspect of the mystery of salvation that we celebrate today is not so different from the one we celebrated ten days ago on Trinity Sunday: God is love. Not only is He love towards us, but He wants to bring us into the mystery of love that unites the Father and the Son in one Breath.
One of the images already used by the prophets in the Old Testament (e.g. Ezekiel, in today's first reading), and which Jesus takes up again in the Gospel, is that of the loving care shown by a true shepherd for his sheep, especially those that are lost and whom he goes out to seek. It is this mystery of love that we celebrate in the solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
The heart is conceived in all cultures as the place where feelings, emotions and love reside. This is why, starting in the Middle Ages, mystics such as Gertrude, Catherine of Siena, Matilda, Margaret Alacoque, and John Eudes developed a devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which is not a devotion to a physical organ, but to the divine love experienced by God made man. Although this devotion has at times taken on rather romantic and sentimental expressions, as evidenced by a vast collection of devotional images of rather dubious taste, it is essentially, in its original intuition, nothing more than the contemplation of God's love for us, incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth.
A few days after his Resurrection, Jesus invited us, in the person of Thomas, to enter into his heart by putting our hand into his open side. What we discovered then in that open heart was love – a love strong enough to give his life for those he loved. And this love, Paul tells us, ‘has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us’. So, to use another expression of Paul, we can (through this gaping wound in Jesus' side) ‘enter into the fullness of God’.
At the very moment when we enter into his heart, if we settle there, if we take root there and make our home there, as He asks us to do, Christ Himself, in turn, ‘makes His home’ in our hearts.
The tearing of Jesus' side and the wound in His heart have opened a passage in our own hearts through which the Breath that He gave to His Father on the cross has been able to enter us, so that, as Paul says again, the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Spirit, the breath of Jesus that was given to us, and which enables us to say, like Him and with Him: Abba, Father.
Since He loved us so much, let us also love one another with the same love.