Solemnity of Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

Lectionary: 170

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.

It was not because you are the largest of all nations

that the LORD set his heart on you and chose you,

for you are really the smallest of all nations.

It was because the LORD loved you

and because of his fidelity to the oath he had sworn your fathers,

that he brought you out with his strong hand from the place of slavery,

and ransomed you from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.

 

For this Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Church offers a reading from the Torah, the oldest source of our faith. Within the Book of Deuteronomy the Voice of God assures us of the deep affection in which the Lord holds us. We owe God’s merciful attention not to any power, charm, virtue, or wisdom of ours. Indeed, we have no singular trait to identify us from the innumerable peoples of the Earth. If we enjoy a characteristic that makes us good, of which we might boast, many other peoples have as good or better. That's a contest we can never win and need not enter.

God's favor begins with Abraham, continues with Moses and David, and climaxes -- if we can use so mild a word -- with the revelation of Jesus Christ. That benign gaze is totally gratuitous. The Lord owes us nothing. If the favor of God is not arbitrary, we have no idea why it should be us. Among all the mysteries that are revealed to us, that one is not. 

But why would we ask? Do children ask their parents why they love them? Would a wise parent answer such a foolish question? 

Our response begins not with questioning but with gratitude. 

And then we aspire to be worthy of God's choice. 

I say aspire rather than try, or even strive. Trying might be driven by vanity, and if I accomplish anything by my trying I will certainly boast of it. "Look how I have proven myself worthy!" 

Striving is a better choice, as in, "Strive to enter through the narrow gate!" But how hard is it to walk through a narrow gate? We're not talking about Fat Man's Misery, the famously narrow passage in Mammoth Cave.

Our journey with the Lord begins with God's initiative. The Lord has chosen us as a parent chooses a child, daily, consistently, persistently, freely and generously. Our parts, as we let him take our hand, are Amen and Thank you. 

The image of the Sacred Heart comes to us as a comfort in our misery, and a solace in our disappointment. 

The tradition has a long development but the image has come to us recently, in the last few centuries, as modern life becomes more and more complex. The Sacred Heart of Jesus comes to us first as millions, and then as billions of people, are deprived of the respect they should be given and the dignity that should be honored. The powerful leaders of our society are increasingly drawn from a small "elite" who prove their incompetence by rigging the financial, political, and economic systems to secure their comfortable status. Because it is unjust it is unstable and violent. 

Poverty is a violence which is no more necessary than an epidemic transmitted by deliberate and incautious behavior. It is born of a Darwinian society that assumes that God, and not we human beings, decreed the "survival of the fittest." (A theory which is immediately disproven by the obvious unfitness of the surviving elite!) 

The Sacred Heart speaks to us with compassion and understands our sin. He has lived in our world and suffered our injustice. His Sacred Heart has been stabbed not only with a soldier's lance but by the cruel indifference of an impassive society. They just don't care. As Hannah Arendt said of Adolph Eichmann: 

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.

While the Sacred Heart comforts us, it also challenges us to be "a people peculiarly his own." We cannot accept the ubiquitous standards of competition and survival that our culture celebrates as normal. We cannot endorse the racism that would promote one so-called race at the expense of the common good.

We can turn to the Lord and his Spirit for guidance and instruction in all our thinking, speaking, and acting. That Spirit is given to us despite our apparent unworthiness, we must not grieve it.