HOMILY
Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus – June 27, 2025
80th Anniversary of the Sacred Heart Guild
I will be ordained a priest for 42 years this coming November. During all those years, I’ve been privileged to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation and hear the confessions of countless numbers of faithful souls. Those sacramental encounters are filled with God’s grace, aren’t they? They are filled with the pledge of God’s redemptive, selfless love promised to every soul who seeks a way forward through God’s mercy. They are filled with the forgiveness that Jesus won for us through his death on the cross.
Yet, to this day, I am always brokenhearted – as I know my brother priests are as well – when a poor soul approaches this life-giving sacrament and begins by saying, “Father, I know I confessed this sin before, but I just want to be certain that it’s been forgiven.” … My response to such words is typically to assure such a penitent that if that sin was confessed with a sincere heart and purpose of amendment, it’s not only forgiven, but long forgotten by God. … The heart-breaking element of such a confession is that sometimes we simply cannot forgive ourselves and, in the process, we put limits on God’s mercy and fidelity.
Isn’t it interesting how we often perceive God? … The best of us at times put limits on God’s capacity to love and care for us, don’t we? … We judge ourselves – or worse yet, others – by our own understanding of life and justice and not God’s. … And while we all know of the truth of the Gospel message, so very often, we miss what permeates all that has been revealed about God in the scriptures – both the Old and New Testaments. … “God is love.”
If we’re not convinced by these words, go back in the Old Testament, to a passage written hundreds of years before the gospels and listen again to the Word of God that we just heard from the Book of the prophet Ezekiel: “Thus says the Lord God: I myself will look after and tend my sheep. … I will rescue them from every place where they were scattered. … I myself will give them rest. … The lost I will seek out, the strayed I will bring back, the injured I will bind up, the sick I will hear.” From Old Testament times, the core of salvation history is God’s unfailing love and election, and our human answer to that love.
These words remind us that our faith is not simply the result of our searching for God. In Jesus Christ, it is God who comes to find us – the lost sheep of his flock – to speak to us and to show us the way to himself.
Earlier today on this solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, in a Mass during which he ordained he ordained thirty-two men to the priesthood, our Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, referenced words of his predecessor, Pope Francis. They were taken from our late Holy Father’s final encyclical letter published just six months prior to his passing. In Dilexit nos – On the human and divine love of the Heart of Jesus Christ, Pope Francis reflected: “In a world where everything is bought and sold … and we are constantly being pushed to keep buying, consuming and distracting ourselves, … the love of Christ has no place in this perverse mechanism, yet only that love can set us free from a mad pursuit that no longer has room for a gratuitous love. … The wounded side of Christ continues to pour forth that love, which is never exhausted, never passes away, but offers itself time and time again to all those who wish to love as he did. For his love alone can bring about a new humanity”
What a blessing we’re given in the gratuitous love that flows from the Sacred Heart of Jesus!
Yet, make no mistake; the love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that flows into our lives is not a cheap love. It was born on the cross and cost Jesus his life. In turn, it becomes for us the very source of our life and salvation. Recall the words from our second reading from Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans, “The love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. … It is precisely in this that God proves his love for us: that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Once captured by God’s love, we have no choice but to respond in the same spirit that gives us hope. While God’s love doesn’t cause us, at once, to be perfect nor does it wipe away in an instant the brokenness of our human frailty, it does enable us to assume, more and more, the pattern of Jesus’ life and mission in our own lives and hearts.
But lest we romanticize this notion, reflect with me for a moment on the heart of Jesus. … Yes, Jesus’ heart was moved with pity when he saw broken, hopeless people before him. Yet when he brought them healing and hope, his heart was also wounded by criticism and broken by a lack of gratitude. … Yes, Jesus’ heart moved him to tears over the lack of love so evident in the streets of Jerusalem. Yet when he tried to call the people to repent and to be gathered into the loving arms of God, he was marched out of the city as a criminal and hung upon a tree.
True followers of Jesus will come to know this tension well. They will know the consolation that comes from opening our hearts to the heart of Christ. But they will also know the pain that so often accompanies the conviction to live the Gospel of Jesus in the midst of a world that so often disregards its values. That pain, my brothers and sisters, is the cost of discipleship.
And it is in this very tension that we discover the mystery of faith that emerges from the loving heart of Jesus. “God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” Jesus’ total gift of himself – seen most powerfully in his love poured forth from the cross – is the gift that gives us true hope. … It is the gift that enables us to move beyond ourselves in love and service of our brothers and sisters. … It is the gift that allows us to see through the pain of this world to the promise of life and peace. … Saint Francis of Assisi captured it best in these familiar words: “It is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”
As we embrace the gift and responsibility that come from opening our hearts to the love that flows from the humble, sacred heart of Jesus, may each day find us accepting with renewed confidence the words spoken by God to Abraham at the beginning of the patriarch’s long and incredible journey of faith: “Fear not.” … May we trust the goodness of God and allow life to unfold, even in unexpected ways. … May we come to know the depth of God’s love for us in Jesus. … And through the gift of our lives, may we, in turn, be living images of the God who is love and faithful witnesses to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.