In our recent Pentecost lectures, Fr. Thomas Joseph White explored how the life, death and resurrection of Jesus reveal the mystery of the Holy Trinity. White’s starting point of course was the mystery of the Incarnation. For we believe - and it’s true! - that the man Jesus is also God the Son; he is at once fully human, and also fully divine.
We might follow through some of these reflections as we ponder today the mystery of the Heart of Jesus. This human Heart is filled with the grace of the Holy Spirit; bathed, saturated in the Holy Spirit. Fr. Thomas Joseph gave us the image or comparison of a man standing in the centre of the sun. The Heart of Jesus is incomparably more full of the Holy Spirit than any other human heart ever has been or ever could be. And this has very positive implications for us, because as St. John says in the Prologue to his Gospel: From his fullness have we all received (Jn 1:16).
The grace that Jesus possessed in its fullness is known by scholastic theologians as “created grace”: the same grace that is in principle available to us. By it, the human Heart or will or love of Jesus was able to be perfectly conformed to the heart or will or love of God. So the love which God the Son eternally has for God the Father is humanly experienced, humanly expressed, and humanly revealed in the man Jesus. The man Jesus also humanly experienced, humanly expressed, and humanly revealed the love God the Holy Trinity eternally has for sinners. This divine and Trinitarian love for us involves a respect for our created freedom, a compassion for our wretchedness, and a will for our salvation. Of course God is too great merely to will a minimal sort of salvation: that we not be punished as we deserve. No: God wants to pour out limitlessly his divine blessings on us: not just salvation, but sanctification, and glorification, and divinisation, and adoption into the divine Sonship of Jesus.
Our way of return to God follows something of a mirror image to the order of processions in the Holy Trinity. That is, our first encounter with God is through the Holy Spirit, who touches our hearts, and prompts us to acknowledge Jesus as Son of God, and Saviour, and Lord. United then with Jesus through the gift of the Holy Spirit, we thereby are brought into relationship with God the Father. With Jesus, and in the Spirit, we come to him, and know him, and are filled by him, and our cry to him is Abba! Father! (Gal 4:6; Rm 8:15). In a similar way the man Jesus was obedient to the Holy Spirit, taught by the Holy Spirit, informed by the Holy Spirit, directed by the Holy Spirit, although eternally the Holy Spirit has his origin from God the Son as well as from God the Father.
The obedience of Jesus to the Holy Spirit was manifested supremely on the Cross. There he showed his love for God and for us “to the end” (cf. Jn 13:1). Today’s Gospel invites us to consider in a special way the wound made in the Heart of the Jesus by the lance of the soldier. Under the signs of poured out blood and water, God’s love, God’s grace, the Person of God the Holy Spirit is, as it were, unleashed into the world. Fr. Thomas Joseph pointed out that the death of Jesus had to come before this: the atoning sacrifice that brings about our reconciliation with God had first to be accomplished. But once the mission of Jesus is consummated, immediately, according to St. John, he gives up, or hands over the Spirit. And here we see the order of Trinitarian processions truly reflected, as the Spirit sent by the Father is breathed forth also from the Son.
Contemplating the dead Jesus hanging there on the Cross, we consider how all his wounds have been caused by our sins: by my own sins especially. If we could realise even the smallest part of what this means, our own hearts would surely burst with grief. Yet the wound in the Heart of Jesus is for us sheer blessing. It’s the door through which God’s love in the Holy Spirit endlessly pours out on us. Or, going in the opposite direction, the wound in the Heart of Jesus is the open door through which we ourselves can enter the furnace of that love, if only we dare. We can penetrate ever more deeply into its inmost recesses, and be transformed by its radiant power, according to our correspondence with grace: so much so that, in the end, we too can be compared to a man who stands in the centre of the sun.
One feature of our contemporary secular culture is that many people find it hard to believe in God’s love, or God’s forgiveness, or God’s mercy for them. Actually this is quite rational, because by our sins we truly make ourselves horrible, and God is all pure and all good, so how could he ever want to have anything to do with me? Today’s feast focusses God’s answer to that. Indeed the Heart of the Jesus somehow focusses the whole of the New Testament, and the whole of divine Revelation. In this human Heart, which is also the Heart of a Divine Person, we know that God is for us, not against us (cf. Rm 8:31). In this Heart we know that our sins are in principle overcome; that God’s love reaches us even while we are sinners (cf. Rm 5:8); and that through it we are not doomed to remain stuck in sin, but can by God’s grace truly become holy; truly conformed to Jesus.
At Vigils this morning we heard the end of the eighth Chapter of St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Who, cries Paul there, rhetorically, shall ever separate us from the love of Christ? (v. 35). And in purple prose Paul goes on to list external forces, natural and supernatural, which ever threaten to overwhelm us. Triumphantly he proclaims that, according to the logic of our participation in Christ’s death and resurrection, the more these hostile forces try to do against us, the greater is our victory. Trouble, affliction, persecution, suffering, death itself may all be in store for us. Let them come. But the love of God revealed in the Heart of Jesus is irreversibly established for us, communicated to us, victorious for us; always open to us, always calling out to us, always inviting us: our endless hope, our consolation, our salvation, our life, our joy.