4th Sunday of Pentecost

Saturday, 12 June 2021

Issue

344

Dear Brothers and Sisters
June is the month dedicated by the Catholic Church to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the Friday following the second Sunday after Pentecost, which this year fell on the 11th of June.  Although this feast was approved to be celebrated by the whole Church in 1856 by Pope Pius IX, the revelation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the revelation of the almighty love of God, goes back to the history of salvation. As Saint John tells us in his letter, God first loved us (1 Jn 4:19). Our faith resides in this amazing statement: God loved us first and for free, without any merit on our part. Each one of us could even say: God loved me first. Because God does not love us in bulk but each one with a personal and unique love. God loved me first because He is Love, full love, perfect charity. If God did not speak to us the first word of His love, we would not exist. But to stop there would be insufficient. The love of God is not the conceptual love of a God up there in heaven but the love of a God who took flesh from our flesh, and who became man. It is the love of a God according to the human nature He has assumed. Here we touch the essence of the message of the feast of the Sacred Heart. The love of God is not a concept, it is a Heart, that of Christ. “Behold the Heart that has so loved men that it has spared nothing,” said Christ to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. God did not just love us divinely, He also wanted to love us humanly. If the Sacred Heart reminds us of divine love, it also reveals to us the human character of this love in its gentleness and its humility: "for I am gentle and humble of heart" (Matt 11:29). The only way to love, as the only way to believe, is to abide in God and God in us. It is the divine presence which alone makes it possible both to believe and to love. Established in this love, let us no longer be afraid. Through His Son, delivered up for our sin, God loved us first and came and dwelt in us so that we in turn can dwell in Him, in the peace and serenity that faith and love give!