The Sacred Heart of Jesus Bled for Love of Us
Today in the Catholic Church is the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It honors Christ’s infinite love for us, most perfectly illustrated in His Passion and Death, when a soldier pieced Christ’s physical heart with a lance.
Jesus told His apostles right before His Passion (Jn.15:13), “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends, if you do the things that I command you.” Jesus died for everyone, all sinners, but He was a little consoled in His immense suffering by the devotion of those who followed His commands and thus were His friends. Jesus expressed the greatest possible love by dying for us and our sins, and we should repay Him by doing everything possible to obey and love Him in return.
In 1 John 4:16, the Apostle John wrote, “Ὁ Θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν (Ho Theos agape estin),” which is translated in Latin “Deus caritas est” and then into English as “God is charity.” It all means the same thing: that love, love in its fullest sense, as sacrificing and working for the good of the beloved regardless of the latter’s deserts, is identical with God. “For God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believeth in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting,” Jesus said (Jn. 3:16).
The Apostle who wrote down all these beautiful verses in the Bible, John, was standing below the cross of Christ when Christ died. John heard Jesus forgive His executioners (Lk.23:34), John received Jesus’s mother to care for at the dying Son’s behest (Jn. 19:26-27), and John saw a soldier pierce Jesus’s heart with a lance (Jn.19:34). Is it any wonder that self-sacrificial love should figure so prominently in John’s writings? Jesus had bled so much in His Passion that when His side was pierced, the last drops of blood and water came out. And John tells us (1 Jn.4:7, 19), “Dearly beloved, let us love one another, for charity is of God. And every one that loveth, is born of God, and knoweth God…Let us therefore love God, because God first hath loved us.” After all, Christ said the two greatest commandments were love for God and love for neighbor (Matt. 22:37-39).
On this feast of the Sacred Heart, let us vow to spend our lives in loving God and each other, so that we too might one day here the words of Jesus (Matt.25:34), “Come, ye blessed of my Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”