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Father Mark D.
Kirby, O.Cist.
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'We see who Jesus is
if we see him at prayer'
"In the pierced
heart of the Crucified, God's own heart is opened up; here we see who God is
and what he is like. Heaven is no longer locked up. God has stepped out of
his hiddenness. That is why St John sums up both the meaning of the Cross and
the nature of the new worship of God in the mysterious promise made through
the prophet Zechariah (cf. 12:10). 'They shall look on him whom they have
pierced' (Jn 19.37)".1
Pope Benedict XVI:
Theologian of the Heart of Christ
In July of 1985, 1
was standing in the bookstore of the Abbey of Sainte-Cécile of Solesmes in France when, by a wonderful providence of
God, I met the Benedictine scholar, Mother Elisabeth de Solms. The encounter
remains unforgettable. I had long studied and used her admirable translation
of the Life and Rule of Saint Benedict, as well as her Christian Bible,2 a
series of volumes setting the commentaries of the Church Fathers line by line
alongside the Scriptures.
The simplicity of so
great a woman was a marvel. She engaged me in conversation, asking if I had
read the works of Cardinal Ratzinger. I admitted that I was familiar with
certain writings of his, surely not with everything published. "Read
him", she said. "You will see. God will make of him a great gift to
his Church". That was 20 years ago.
I began reading
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. I devoured, in particular, his writings on the
sacred liturgy in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. I discovered, among
other things in the writings of Cardinal Ratzinger, elements of a theology of
the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
In Pope Benedict XVI
God has given the Church a shepherd who has contemplated the pierced Heart of
the Crucified and already written of it, notably in Behold The
Pierced One3 and, more recently, in The Spirit of
the Liturgy.
Cardinal Ratzinger's
writings on the Sacred Heart are warm and luminous. Fire and light are
characteristic of a theology forged in experience.
Theologians who do
not persevere in a humble prayer of amazement and adoration fall inevitably
into one of two syndromes. Either they generate heat without shedding any
light, or they shine a cold light, one that fails to warm the heart. The true
theologian at once warms the heart and illumines the mind.
Recall the words of
Jesus concerning John the Baptist: "He was a burning and shining lamp,
and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light" (Jn 5:35). In
our new Holy Father, God has given the Church "a burning and shining
lamp" (Jn 5:35). Those already familiar with his writings and liturgical
preaching know what I mean.
Theology itself is a
difficult word. Theology of the Sacred Heart thrusts us into deep waters. The
Song of Songs assures us that "many waters cannot quench love, neither
can floods drown it" (8:7).
Theology is more
than a mere flood of words. All words oblige us, in some way, to wrestle with
meaning. Words are the vehicle of meaning. Words wait to be unlocked. The
words we use in talking about God, or in talking to God, can be unlocked only
in prayer.
Before we can
reflect on a theology of the Sacred Heart, we have to ask ourselves this
question: "What do we mean by theology?".
The Greek etymology
of the word discloses both God (theós) and word (lógos). Lógos, in turn, has a
huge richness: it can mean word, but it also signifies meaning, message, poem
and even hymn.
When we speak of
theology we mean not one thing but at least three: word from God; word to
God; and word about God. All theology, and therefore a theology of the Sacred
Heart, is more adequately understood in terms of: God's self-revealing word
addressed to us; the doxological word of Christ and of the Church addressed
to God; and the healing word of the Church addressed to the world.
Sacred Heart: God's
Word addressed to us
When we speak of a
theology of the Sacred Heart, we mean this first of all: not our discourse
about love, but the love of God revealed first to us, the poem of love that
issues forth from the Heart of God. This is exactly what St John, whom the
Eastern tradition calls, "The Theologian", says in his First
Letter: "In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and
sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins" (I Jn 4:10).
The difficulty here
is that, in order to receive this word inscribed in the flesh of the Word
(cf. Jn 1:14), we have first to stop in front of it, to linger there and to
look long at the wound made by love. "They shall look on him whom they
have pierced" (Jn 19:37). To contemplate is to look, not with a passing
glance, but with the gaze of one utterly
conquered by love. Jeremiah says, "You have seduced me, O Lord, and I was seduced; you are stronger than I, and you have prevailed" (20:7).
The word of
Crucified Love is hard to pronounce — not with our
lips but with our lives. Adoration is the school wherein one learns how to
say the Sacred Heart. It is in adoration that the apostle receives the word
of the pierced Heart that, in turn, becomes his life's message.
Adoration and
apostleship together model a spirituality accessible to all Christians: the
word received in adoration is communicated in the dynamism of one sent forth
with something to say.
Sacred Heart: Our
word addressed to God
Theology is, in the
second place, our word addressed to God. Applying this also to the Sacred
Heart of Jesus, we see that all we could possibly want to say to God has
already been uttered and is being said eternally through the
"mouth" of Christ's glorious pierced Heart in heaven. It is through
the Sacred Heart that the Blood of Christ speaks "more graciously than
the blood of Abel" (Heb 12:24).
The Letter to the
Hebrews puts it this way: "Christ is able for all time to save those who
draw near to God through him, since he lives for ever to make intercession
for them" (7:25). Christ exercises his priesthood of intercession in
"the inner sanctuary behind the veil" (Heb 6:19) by presenting to
the Father the glorious wounds in his hands, his feet and his side. The wound
in the side of Christ, "great high priest over the house of God"
(Heb 10:21), speaks to the Father on our behalf. It is our word addressed to
God.
At the core of
devotion to the Sacred Heart is a passing-over into the prayer of Christ to
the Father, a long apprenticeship to silence by which we begin to let the
Heart of Christ speak in us and for us to the Father.
The mystics of the
Sacred Heart, in particular St Gertrude and St Mechthilde, speak of offering
the Sacred Heart of Jesus to the Father. This means allowing the Sacred Heart
to speak for us, to pray in us, to pray through us, taking comfort in what
Scripture says, "that we have not a high priest who is unable to
sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted
as we are, yet without sin" (Heb 4:15).
This suggests a
simple way of praying, one accessible to all: "Lord Jesus, I come to be
silent in your presence, trusting that your Heart will speak for me, knowing
that all I could ever want to say, that all I would ever need to say, is
spoken eternally to the Father by your Sacred Heart".
In this way,
everything that prayer can or should express — adoration, praise, thanksgiving, supplication and
reparation — finds its most perfect expression.
Devotion to the
Sacred Heart, thus understood, is a manifestation in the Church of the Holy
Spirit, "helping us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as
we ought" (Rom 8:26).5 The Sacred Heart is, in the life
of the Church, the organ by which "the Spirit intercedes for the saints
according to the will of God" (Rom 8:27).
Cardinal Ratzinger
wrote: "We see who Jesus is if we see him at prayer. The Christian
confession of faith comes from participating in the prayer of Jesus, from
being drawn into his prayer and being privileged to behold it; it interprets
the experience of Jesus' prayer, and its interpretation of Jesus is correct
because it springs from a sharing in what is most personal and intimate to
him".6
This is the prayer
of the Sacred Heart, the prayer that filled the days and nights of Jesus'
earthly life, the prayer that suffused his sufferings and ascended from the Cross
at the hour of his death, the prayer that with him descended into the depths
of the earth, the prayer that continues uninterrupted in the glory of his
risen and ascended life, the prayer that is ceaseless in the Sacrament of the
Altar.
Cardinal Ratzinger
wrote that "by entering into Jesus' solitude", and "only by
participating in what is most personal to him, his communication with the
Father, can one see what this most personal reality is; only thus can one
penetrate to his identity".7The Sacred
Heart represents and invites us into what is most personal to Jesus: his communication with the Father.
In words that today
sound almost prophetic, Cardinal Ratzinger concluded that "the person
who has beheld Jesus' intimacy with his Father and has come to understand him
from within is called to be a 'rock' of the Church. The Church arises out of
participation in the prayer
of Jesus (cf. Lk 9:18-20; Mt 16:13-20)".8
Prayer of the Sacred
Heart in the New Testament
The Letter to the
Hebrews tells us exactly what was the prayer of the Heart of Christ at the
moment he took flesh in the Virgin's womb: "When Christ came into the
world, he said, 'Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body
you have prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken
no pleasure'. Then I said, 'Behold, I have come to do your will, O God', as
it is written of me in the scroll of the book'" (Heb 10:5-7). This is
the first prayer of the Heart of Jesus, "substantially united to the
Word of God".9
The prayer of the
Heart of Christ revealed in the Letter to the Hebrews resonates throughout
the Fourth Gospel. Cardinal Ratzinger wrote: "We could say that the
Fourth Gospel draws us into that intimacy which Jesus reserved for those who
were his friends" (ibid., 22). The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple
belongs, in a special sense, to the friends of the Heart of Jesus.
The liturgy gives us
the Gospel of St John on every Sunday and weekday during Paschaltide. Holy
Thursday's Gospel of Jesus washing his disciples' feet at the Last Supper
(cf. Jn 13:1-5) becomes Good Friday's Gospel of the Heart from which flowed
blood and water: "They shall look on him whom they have pierced"
(cf. Jn 19:34-37).
By continuing to
read the Fourth Gospel on Easter Sunday (Jn 20:1-9) and for the 50 days
following, the liturgy guides us into the prayer of the Heart of Christ.
The Second Sunday of
Easter, that of Divine Mercy, invites us in a particular way to the
contemplation of the Sacred Heart. In the Gospel (Jn 20:19-31), the Risen
Christ stands before Thomas, inviting him to touch his wounded side. Cardinal
Ratzinger wrote: "All of us are Thomas, unbelieving; but like him, all
of us can touch the exposed Heart of Jesus and... behold the Logos himself.
So, with our hands and eyes fixed upon this Heart, we can attain to the
confession of faith: 'My Lord and my God!'".10
The liturgical
lectionary's repartition of the Fourth Gospel is integral to the mystical
pedagogy of the Church. When the liturgical Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of
Jesus arrives on the Friday following the Second Sunday after Pentecost, it
finds us already prepared, ready and full of desire to pass fully into the
prayer of the Sacred Heart.
For Cardinal
Ratzinger, "the entire Gospel testimony is unanimous that Jesus' words
and deeds flowed from his most intimate communion with the Father; that he
continually went 'into the hills' to pray in solitude after the burden of the
day (cf., Mk 1:35; 6:46; 14:35, 39)".11 He
notes that "Luke, of all the Evangelists, lays stress on this feature.
He shows that the essential events of Jesus' activity proceeded from the core
of his personality and that this core was his dialogue with the Father".12
The psalms also
express and communicate the prayer of the Heart of Christ. The Psalter is for
the Church a "sacrament" of
.
Jesus intoned two
psalms from the Cross, leaving it to his Church to continue them: Psalm 21 in
Matthew 21:46, and Psalm 30 in Luke 23:46.
"And about the
ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?' that
is, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"' (Mt 27:46). The Church,
imaged in the Mother of Jesus, the beloved disciple and the other holy women
at the foot of the Cross (cf. Jn 19:25), prays the psalm through to the end
to discover in its triumphant final verses (cf. Ps 21:22-31) the promise of a
banquet for the afflicted and the hope of the resurrection: "The
afflicted shall eat and be satisfied; and those who seek him shall praise the
Lord! May your hearts live for ever" (Ps 21:26).
Psalm 30 gives the
verse, "Into your hands I commit my spirit" (Ps 30:5). Praying it
from the Cross at the hour of his death, Jesus adds a single word, a word
that rises out of the depths of his Heart and utterly transforms the
psalmist's prayer into one by which the Son entrusts everything to the
Father. "Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, 'Father, into your
hands I commit my spirit!'. And having said this he breathed his last"
(Lk 23:46).
"Jesus died
praying.... Although the Evangelists' accounts of the last words of Jesus
differ in details, they agree on the fundamental fact that Jesus died
praying. He fashioned his death into an act of prayer, an act of worship....
The last words of Jesus were an expression of his devotion to the Father....
His cry was not uttered to anyone, anywhere, but to Him, since it was of his
innermost essence to be in a dialogue relationship with the Father".13
Prayer of the Sacred
Heart in the Liturgy
The prayer of the
Heart of Christ at the hour of his sacrifice passes entirely into the heart
of the Church, where it is prolonged and actualized "from the rising of
the sun to its setting" (Mal 1:11) in the Liturgy of the Hours and in
the mystery of the Eucharist.
Cardinal Ratzinger
asks if, after the once-for-all Pasch of Jesus, anything more is needed.
"After the tearing of the Temple curtain and the opening up of the heart
of God in the pierced heart of the Crucified, do we still need sacred space,
sacred time, mediating symbols? Yes, we do need them, precisely so that,
through the 'image', through the sign, we learn to see the openness of
heaven. We need them to give us the capacity to know the mystery of God in
the pierced heart of the Crucified".14
It is through the
liturgy, first and above all, that we pass over into the prayer of the Sacred
Heart, the word to the Father forever inscribed in his pierced side.
Sacred Heart: the
Church's Word to the World
Theology is,
finally, a word about God addressed to the world, a word about God addressed
to anyone who will listen. The Sacred Heart, pierced in death, becomes a word
of life for the world.
"Death, which
by its very nature is the end, the destruction of every communication, is
changed by Jesus into an act of self-communication; and this is man's
redemption, for it signifies the triumph of love over death. We can put the
same thing another way: death, which puts an end to words and to meaning,
itself becomes a word, becomes the place where meaning communicates
itself".15
This means that
after the mouth of Jesus fell silent in death, there remained the open side
and the pierced Heart that speaks of nothing but love, the ultimate and
everlasting word about God.
In the final
analysis, one "impelled by the charity of Christ" (cf. II Cor 5:14)
will have but one message, that of the pierced Heart revealing the love of
the Father and "drawing all to himself" (cf. Jn 12:32).
One who has contemplated
the message carved in the flesh of Jesus' side by the soldier's lance and
learned to read it in adoration has but one language in which to speak to the
world: the language of the heart.
It is learned not in
conferences or classrooms or books, but in silence and in the contemplation
of the Pierced One. It is learned especially in the presence of the Blessed
Sacrament.
The language of the
heart encompasses a thousand local dialects, a million accents. Devotion to
the Sacred Heart impels the Christian to an inventive charity, a charity
ready to explore every dark and treacherous place in search of the lost
sheep.
"Go out quickly
to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and maimed and
blind and lame" (Lk 14:21). "The great gesture of embrace emanating
from the Crucified has not yet reached its goal; it has only just
begun."16
Word from God, Word
to God, Word for the World
Word of God
addressed to us, word addressed to God, word of the Church addressed to the
world: herein lies one approach to a theology of the Sacred Heart. The
liturgy remains its primary articulation. Together with the Liturgy of the
Hours for the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, the 12 biblical texts provided
for the Mass — a First Reading; Psalm, Second Reading
and Gospel for each of the three years A, B and C— become a fundamental resource, an inexhaustible treasure
waiting to be mined for every one called to hear, to pray and to offer the
healing word that is the pierced Heart.
The Sacred Heart is
the Heart of God laid bare for man: word from God. It is a human Heart lifted
high on the Cross: word to God. It is the Heart of the Church open to all who
seek, to all who thirst, to every lost sheep waiting to be found and carried
home: word for the world.
The Sacred Heart of
Jesus is the full and irrevocable message of the Father to us. It is
everything we ever could or should need to say to the Father. It is all we
have to say to one another and to the world.
Pope Benedict XVI,
writing in 1981 as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, challenges us to nothing less:
"In the Heart of Jesus, the center of Christianity is set before us. It
expresses everything, all that is genuinely new and revolutionary in the New
Covenant. This Heart calls to our heart. It invites us to step forth out of
the futile attempt of self-preservation and, by joining in the task of love,
by handing ourselves over to him and with him, to discover the fullness of
love which alone is eternity and which alone sustains the world".17
NOTES
1 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), p. 48.
2 Mére Elisabeth de
Solms, La vie et la règle de saint Benoît (Paris: Téqui, 1984); Bible
Chrétienne (Québec: Editions Anne
Sigier et Desclée, 1988).
3 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Behold
The Pierced One, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1986).
4 Card. Ratzinger, The Spirit of
the Liturgy, p. 48.
5 Cf. Litany of the Sacred Heart.
6 Card. Ratzinger, Behold The
Pierced One, p. 19.
7 Ibid., p. 19.
8 Ibid.
9 Cf. Litany of the Sacred Heart.
10 Card. Ratzinger, Behold The Pierced
One, p. 54.
11 Ibid., p. 17.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., pp. 22-24.
14 Card. Ratzinger, The Spirit of
the Liturgy, p. 61.
15 Card. Ratzinger, Behold The
Pierced One, p. 25.
16 Card. Ratzinger, The Spirit of
the Liturgy, p. 50.
17 Card. Ratzinger, Behold The
Pierced One, p. 69.
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Taken from:
L'Osservatore Romano Weekly Edition in English 25 May 2005, page 10
L'Osservatore Romano
is the newspaper of the Holy See.
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