THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS – THRONE OF GOD’S LOVE

 

 

“Our merciful Jesus, who has purchased us with His own blood, infinitely desires us to love Him so that we may be saved forever, and He desires us to be saved so that we may love Him forever. His love tends to our salvation, and our salvation tends to His love.” These words of our great patron St. Francis de Sales reveal the Mystery of Divine Love in its true depth. “God is love,” is the truth of which our Holy Father reminded the world in his first encyclical. Love will be the measure of our lives, because it is the very essence of God to Whose image we have been created. The more we love, the more we make His image in us become a lived reality and the more we prepare for the eternal loving union with Him. Love is not merely a word, it is not a feeling and certainly not a sentimental effusion of emotions. True love may come together with these manifestations of the entire involvement of our being, but is much more: Love and charity are an attitude of a whole life, based on Divine grace and leading to the realization of God’s commandments: “He who loves me, keeps my commandments.” Not sighs and exclamations, not words and principles, but deeds and works show our love to God. The virtue of Charity, infused into our souls in the moment of baptism together with Faith and Hope, enable us to lead a life of love, which is an answer to God’s gracious gift: “I have loved you first!” This truth is shown to us through the very symbol of Divine Love, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, whose month we celebrate every June. The Servant of God Pope Pius XII in his famous encycli- cal “Haurietis aquas” calls the Heart of the Redeemer a “real symbol” for Divine Charity, in so far as it symbolizes what it really is: The Throne of God’s Love, the Altar of the Supreme Sacrifice of Charity, the See of the Trinitarian Presence in this world. And here again, the rule of love becomes true. The Heart of Jesus does not exhaust His love in pious aspirations, nice sentiments or human emotions, but is ready to be opened for the sake of our salva- tion and to pour His blood over the world to cleanse sinners from their guilt. For this reason, our reli- gion is not a religion of sterile sentimentalism concentrated on our own feelings, but a worship of God in “deed and truth.” Our adoration of the Divine Heart reminds us of the penance and the amendment that we owe to God for our sins, and of the active charity that alone will combine love and reality. “Live the truth in charity” – this sentence of St. Paul in the letter to the Ephesians, which also is the motto of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, reassumes the deep realism of the Sacred Heart as “summa totius religionis,” as the sum of our whole religion, to speak with Pope Pius XI. Jesus Christ, the Truth incarnate, is the living charity, with His open Heart containing the very center of the Mystery of Incarnation. If we want to follow the Lord, we have to open our hearts to the truth of God and live his com- mandments to the fullest. It is the infusion of Divine Love into our hearts that makes this answer to God’s love possible. St. Francis the Sales states: “Sacred love is a miraculous child, since the human will cannot conceive it unless it is infused into our hearts by the Holy Ghost.” The ven- eration of the Sacred Heart in the month of June will enable the Holy Ghost to infuse this Divine Charity, so that “our hearts are made unto His” to love in deed and in Truth. Msgr. R. Michael Schmitz