Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus
June 16, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/061623.cfm

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we hear Moses tell the People:

You are a people sacred to the LORD, your God;
he has chosen you from all the nations on the face of the earth
to be a people peculiarly his own.

Deuteronomy 7:6

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We modern readers may be a little put off by the use of the word “peculiar” which, since the 16th century, has taken on the connotation of “odd” or “uncommon”. But the original meaning of the word is “to belong exclusively to one person“, as in “Honey, I love you and you belong to me!” Moses is telling Israel that this is the way God loves them.

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Below is a song many us will remember. Maybe as teenagers we even did the “Stroll” to its dulcet tones. The love described in this song is but a pale shadow of the love God has for us, and the longing sung about is but a weak imitation of God’s longing for us. Listen to it and let God sing to you – singing around the words and into the meaning behind them.

Thinking of God as we listen to a song like this can make God very human. And, of course, that is exactly who Jesus Christ is. Jesus loves us with a human heart and a divine love. He loves us with a Sacred Heart.

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All love is refined and proven in sacrifice. Jesus testified to his infinite love for us in his Passion, Death and Resurrection. In that miracle of redemptive love, God embraces, strengthens and commissions us. We are to love as God loves – to have hearts themselves made sacred by imitation of Christ.

“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,
for I am meek and humble of heart;
and you will find rest for yourselves.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

Matthew 11:28-30

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Prose: In the late 17th, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque shared her vision of Christ’s Sacred Heart. In a book of her writings published after her death we read:

Christ showed me that it was His great desire
to be loved by human beings 
and of withdrawing them from the path of ruin 
that made Him form the design 
of manifesting His Heart to us, 
with all the treasures of love, of mercy, of grace, 
of sanctification and salvation which it contains, 
in order that those who desire 
to render Him and procure Him 
all the honor and love possible, 
might themselves be abundantly enriched 
with those divine treasures 
of which His heart is the source.

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Devotion to the Sacred Heart was fostered by the Jesuits and Franciscans, but it was not until the 1928 encyclical Miserentissimus Redemptor by Pope Pius XI that the Church validated the credibility of St. Margaret Mary’s visions of Jesus Christ in having “promised her that all those who rendered this honor to His Heart would be endowed with an abundance of heavenly graces.”

( see: https://sacredheartfla.org/sunday-mornings/seasonal/feast-days-solemnities/the-solemnity-of-the-most-sacred-heart-of-jesus/

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Music: Empty Space – Jose Mari Chan