With great joy we come to celebrate our Patronal Feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. This  year we do so entrusting the local mission here in Georgetown to the Lord’s wounded heart – He who continues to pour forth blessings from His wounded side in favor of us, His unworthy children.

This Feast is a treasure for us inside the tent – but it can be a stumbling block for those who are not yet Catholic. It is a ‘sign of contradiction’ – the world thinks we are mad to celebrate the love of God in such a graphic and challenging way. Whereas we are all too often caught up with great joy – and the image of the Sacred Heart is a comforting refuge in our homes and families.

Remember the great Feast of Pentecost in which we contemplated the mystery of the Lord saying “the Father is greater than I”? That day we came to realize that the Lord is talking of his human nature here, not his divine nature. That is to say – the nature that he assumed, in a moment of time, as a consequence of Mary’s cooperation with the Divine Will.

That masterstroke, the Incarnation, is the way that God dealt with the problem of human sin: this was a problem caused by the fact that when we sin, we offend God infinitely – and an infinite offense requires an infinite satisfaction. The only problem was – God cannot suffer. The only things that God cannot ‘do’ are things that go against His nature – such as to be evil, or limited – or to suffer.

The only way that God could suffer was to assume human nature – a human body and a human soul, and therefore Divine Love was experienced in a beating human heart, that was later spiritually broken by our sin in Gethsemane and physically pierced on the Cross of Calvary: the ‘double agony in man’ as St. John Henry Newman describes it.

Take away the saccharine images (which, in one way, help us approach this divine font – otherwise it would be too gruesome to bear) and we are left with the image of ruined perfection in the Sacred Heart. Before us is the enormity of our sin, but the even greater power of God’s love, stronger than Death itself. Happy Feast to our entire Sacred Heart family!