Holy Innocents Catholic Church!

June 11, 2021

Dear Friends in Christ,

Today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.   This great feast is rooted in Christians meditating for centuries on the wounds Christ endured for our salvation, out of love for us.  In the 1600’s, St. John Eudes and St. Margaret Mary Alacoque promoted devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  St. Margaret Mary was even given visions of the Lord and his Sacred Heart.  In those visions, the Lord Jesus asked her to make his love and goodness known to all.  She wrote of Christ’s Sacred Heart, “This divine heart is an abyss filled with all blessings, and into it the poor should submerge all their needs. It is an abyss of joy in which all of us can immerse our sorrows. It is an abyss of lowliness to counteract our foolishness, an abyss of mercy for the wretched, an abyss of love to meet our every need.”

The scriptures frequently speak of the heart of God and the love which he expresses through his son.  This great feast gives us the opportunity to meditate on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which, though wounded by our sins, beats with a passionate and abiding love for us.  Pope Benedict reflected on this great feast a few years ago:

The heart of God burns with compassion! On today’s solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus the Church presents us this mystery for our contemplation: the mystery of the heart of a God who feels compassion and who bestows all his love upon humanity. A mysterious love, which in the texts of the New Testament is revealed to us as God’s boundless and passionate love for mankind. God does not lose heart in the face of ingratitude or rejection by the people he has chosen; rather, with infinite mercy he sends his only-begotten Son into the world to take upon himself the fate of a shattered love, so that by defeating the power of evil and death he could restore to human beings enslaved by sin their dignity as sons and daughters. But this took place at great cost—the only-begotten Son of the Father was sacrificed on the Cross: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (see Jn 13:1). The symbol of this love which transcends death is his side, pierced by a spear. The Apostle John, an eyewitness, tells us: “one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water” (see Jn 19:34).

Together let us pause to contemplate the pierced heart of the Crucified One. Just now we heard once again, in the brief reading from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, that “God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ... raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:4-6). To be “in” Jesus Christ is already to be seated in heaven. The very core of Christianity is expressed in the heart of Jesus; in Christ the revolutionary “newness” of the Gospel is completely revealed and given to us: the Love that saves us and even now makes us live in the eternity of God. As the Evangelist John writes: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (3:16). God’s heart calls to our hearts, inviting us to come out of ourselves, to forsake our human certainties, to trust in him and, by following his example, to make ourselves a gift of unbounded love. POPE BENEDICT

May the warmth and passion of the Sacred Heart of Jesus always inspire us to respond in love to the one who is love!

Blessings on your week,

Fr Johnson