The
Church has seen a lot of changes throughout its history, that is for sure. To
set up the climate in which today’s solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus came
to birth, the Protestant Reformation and the establishment of the Church of
England in the 16th century divided Christianity in the West. During that same period, the development of Calvinism and Jansenism preached a
view Christianity in which some were destined for eternal life, while others
predestined for damnation. The
Catholic Church opposed this view of the predestination of souls, instead
teaching of the infinite love of Jesus who died on the cross for our sins. The
image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus contributed to the Catholic Church’s teachings
on Jesus’ love for all of humanity. In
the year 1675, Sister Mary Margaret Alacoque, a French nun in the Order of the
Visitation, received messages and appearances from Jesus on his Sacred Heart in
1765. He told her: "I promise you in the excessive mercy of
my Heart that my all-powerful love will grant to all those who receive Holy
Communion on the First Fridays in nine consecutive months the grace of final
perseverance; they shall not die in my disgrace, nor without receiving their
sacraments. My divine Heart shall be their safe refuge in this last moment.”
The actual feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
began in 1765 in Poland and in certain congregations. In 1856, Pope Pius IX
made it a feast for the universal church. In 1899, Pope Leo XIII consecrated
the whole world to the Sacred Heart. Although we celebrate the Sacred Heart of Jesus with this solemnity each year
of the Friday after the Second Sunday after Pentecost, there is a devotion to
the Sacred Heart on the first Friday each month, a devotion that we practice
here at St James. In
the visions received by St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, Jesus promised that those
who made the First Friday devotion for nine consecutive months would be given
the grace of repentance at the moment of death.
We
think of how in our faith, the Sacred Heart of Jesus is a powerful image of the
love of God. Even
when we go back to the Hebrew Scriptures, the heart of God was a key image of
how God kept a covenant with his people. For
the ancient Jewish people, the heart was at the very center of a person. Through the history of ancient Israel, God begged his people to return to him after they had hardened their hearts. Throughout the Gospels, when the Pharisees, Sadducees, and scribes challenge
Jesus to summarize the law of God, he
tells them to love God with all their heart and to love their neighbors as
themselves. In
today’s Gospel, as the Pharisees and scribes challenge Jesus once again, he
tells them about how he as the Good Shepherd would search high and low to bring
that one lost sheep back into the fold, how his love for us has no boundaries
or limits. The
Sacred Heart of Jesus, then, is meant to symbolize the love of God and to evoke
love for God from us. May
this rich devotion of the Sacred Heart of Jesus call out to us today to emulate
this love God has for us in our lives.
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