What Kind of Heart?
“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
What sort of man do you have to be in order to beg for the forgiveness of the very people who killed you? This question and others like it are helpful to us in contemplating the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The liturgical celebration of the Sacred Heart always falls two Fridays after Pentecost as a kind of echo of the Easter Season. This means the date changes a bit, but it always falls in June, which is why the Church calls June the month of the Sacred Heart. Both the liturgical observance and the month-long devotional perspective invite us to consider the fact that the eternally begotten, uncreated Son of God has taken on a literal flesh-and-blood human heart. It’s no accident that this devotion is so popular and moving to Catholics of every age.
For one thing, the literal idea of a human heart makes for a fitting symbol of Christ’s role in the Church. As St. Paul tells us, Jesus Christ is the head of his body, the Church. Scripture also tells us that we are redeemed and given life through the blood Jesus shed on the cross and gave to us in the Eucharist. So, it is a fitting reflection to consider the heart of Jesus as the heart of the Church. As his physical human heart pumped life-giving, oxygen-rich blood to his physical human body on earth, so that heart continues to circulate the precious blood of Jesus to his mystical body, the Church. Jesus, breathing in the Holy Spirit, enriches his precious blood with grace and life and his heart spreads that to every member of his body. That blood was shed on the cross as a result of our sins and as a direct result of the scourging and crucifixion inflicted on him by the Jews and Romans of his day. Since this most awful sin of murdering Jesus the God-man is also what enabled that life-giving blood to flow out for our salvation, it is perhaps a little less surprising that Jesus would seek the forgiveness and salvation of the people who committed that sin. Despite their evil intentions and harmful ignorance, God used it for good.
The more symbolic value of the heart is even more closely connected to our theme this year. Though biological science tells us that the heart doesn’t actually “think” or produce emotions, human cultures in general and the Catholic faith in particular still use the heart as a symbol of man’s inmost being, as a symbol of his deepest thoughts, his feelings, desires, and choices. The “heart” is treated as the kind of central nexus or connection-point of all that makes human beings human. This is what prompts that question: “what kind of man would pray for mercy for his murderers?” We can reformulate that to ask “what kind of heart does a man have to have in order to show compassion to his murderers?” The answer? The Sacred Heart of Jesus. At the very center of who Jesus is is this enduring faithful love that we call mercy.
This doesn’t mean his heart is not also full of justice or courage or the desire to overcome evil. It simply means that all these things are all rooted in that heart of mercy. We see Jesus moved to great anger at injustice and blasphemy. So he is willing to rebuke, even to punish those guilty of these things. The heart of mercy in this is that the punishment and rebuke has the ultimate goal of spurring them to conversion. When faced with our own enemies and persecutors, it is this overall arc of redemption that has to the horizon or backdrop of how we react to them. This is the goal of the traditional prayer, “Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make my heart like unto thine.”
So, while our ultimate goal is to have a heart like Jesus, we must also acknowledge that we do not yet have that heart. It was actually impossible for a human heart to do what Jesus did - begging the forgiveness of his murderers while they were murdering him - until God had united himself to a human heart. If you or those you love do not immediately experience that desire to pray in such a way when being hurt by another, it is not necessarily a failure. To experience anger and outrage and a desire for justice is all normal. Nonetheless, there ought to be at least some aspiration, some expressed prayer of hope that that anger and justice can become ordered towards the salvation of your enemy.
Put another way, this prayer “Father, forgive them…” should begin to infiltrate our fallen, angry, and vengeful hearts. Can we take our desire for the punishment of our enemies and at least attach the goal of “punished so that they repent and are saved” to the anger? This is what it means to make our hearts “like unto” the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Perhaps that begins with an honest prayer like, “Jesus, my heart doesn’t want what your heart does. Loan me your heart! Let your precious blood flow through my heart so that your loving mercy can desire for me what I cannot yet desire for myself.”
So, contemplate the prayer of Jesus upon the cross for his enemies. Contemplate the Sacred Heart that was able to love in such a way. Let that heart love you and make it your daily prayer “Make my heart like unto thine.”