A Reflection for the Feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus
Sacratissimi Cordis Domini Nostri Jesu Christi ~ I. classis Epistle: Ephesians 3:8–12, 14–19 — Gospel: John 19:31–37
I. Liturgical Context
This feast, fixed upon the Friday following the Octave of Corpus Christi, is the liturgical summit of a movement that the whole preceding cycle has prepared. The Church, having adored the Body and Blood of the Lord in the Sacrament, now turns to contemplate the fons et origo—the Heart from which that Body and Blood, and indeed the whole economy of redemption, flow forth. The Introit sets the key in which the entire Mass is sung: Cogitationes Cordis ejus in generatione et generationem (“The thoughts of His Heart unto all generations,” Ps. 32:11). The feast is not, then, a sentimental cult of an organ, but the adoration of the Word made flesh under the most intimate sign of His charity: the human Heart in which the love of God for man becomes visible, beating, and pierceable.
The Collect names the inner logic of the day with great precision: Deus, qui nobis in Corde Filii tui, nostris vulnerato peccatis, infinitos dilectionis thesauros misericorditer largiri dignaris—”O God, who dost mercifully deign to bestow upon us, in the Heart of Thy Son wounded by our sins, the infinite treasures of love.” Two things are bound together here that the Epistle and Gospel will each illuminate: the infiniti thesauri—the boundless riches—and the vulnus, the wound through which those riches are poured out. St. Paul will speak of the riches; St. John will show us the wound.
II. The Epistle: The Unsearchable Riches (Ephesians 3:8–12, 14–19)
St. Paul, who styles himself minimus omnium sanctorum—”the least of all the saints”—declares that grace has been given him to preach among the Gentiles investigabiles divitias Christi, “the unsearchable riches of Christ” (Eph. 3:8). The Latin investigabiles and the Greek anexichniaston carry the sense of untraceable, that which leaves no footprint the mind can follow to its end. The riches of Christ are not merely vast; they are inexhaustible in principle, exceeding every faculty sent to measure them.
St. John Chrysostom, commenting on this passage, fastens upon precisely this incomprehensibility as the ground of wonder rather than of despair. In his homilies on Ephesians he marvels that what the angels did not know—the mystery hidden from ages in God (Eph. 3:9)—is now made known per Ecclesiam, through the Church, to the very principalities and powers (Eph. 3:10). The Church, Chrysostom teaches, becomes the theatre in which the manifold wisdom of God is displayed to the heavenly hosts; the gathering of Jew and Gentile into one Body is itself a revelation to the angels of a wisdom they had not exhausted (In Epistolam ad Ephesios, Hom. VII; PG 62, 50–52). The character and weight of this exposition should be collated against the Benedictine text in PG before citation in print.
The second movement of the Epistle is the great prayer that Paul bows his knees to offer (Eph. 3:14): that the Father would grant the faithful virtute corroborari per Spiritum ejus in interiorem hominem—to be strengthened by His Spirit in the inner man—habitare Christum per fidem in cordibus vestris, that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith (Eph. 3:16–17). Here the providence of the lectionary is evident: on the feast of the Lord’s Heart, the Epistle prays that Christ may dwell within our hearts. The indwelling is reciprocal in figure: the Heart we adore desires to make its dwelling in the heart that adores.
Paul then strains language to its limit, asking that the faithful might comprehend quae sit latitudo, et longitudo, et sublimitas, et profundum—the breadth and length and height and depth (Eph. 3:18). St. Augustine famously discerned in this fourfold measure the very figure of the Cross: its breadth in the transverse beam where the hands are fixed, its length in the upright reaching to the ground, its height above the place where the head rests, its depth fixed hidden in the earth (cf. De Doctrina Christiana II.41; Epistola 140; Enarr. in Ps. 103). Augustine offers this cruciform reading in more than one place with varying emphasis; the precise wording should be verified against CCSL before being quoted as his. If the reading be admitted, the Epistle and Gospel are already joined before the deacon ascends to chant the Passion: the dimensions of the love that surpasses knowledge are the dimensions of the Cross upon which the Heart was opened.
The prayer culminates in a holy paradox: scire etiam supereminentem scientiae caritatem Christi—”to know the charity of Christ, which surpasseth knowledge” (Eph. 3:19). The love is to be known precisely as that which exceeds knowing. This is no contradiction but the proper posture of the creature before the infiniti thesauri: we know Him truly when we know that we have not reached His end.
III. The Gospel: The Opened Side (John 19:31–37)
The Gospel passes from Paul’s soaring prayer to the stark hour beneath the Cross. Because it was the Parasceve, and the bodies were not to remain upon the cross on the Sabbath—erat enim magnus dies ille sabbati—the Jews besought Pilate that the legs of the crucified be broken and the bodies taken away (John 19:31). The soldiers broke the legs of the two crucified with Him; but coming to Jesus and finding Him already dead, non fregerunt ejus crura—they did not break His legs (John 19:33). Instead, unus militum lancea latus ejus aperuit, et continuo exivit sanguis et aqua—”one of the soldiers with a spear opened His side, and immediately there came out blood and water” (John 19:34).
St. John lingers upon the testimony with unusual solemnity: et qui vidit, testimonium perhibuit—”and he that saw it hath given testimony, and his testimony is true” (John 19:35). The Evangelist swears, as it were, to the fact, because upon this fact the Fathers will build the mystery of the Church.
For the patristic tradition is virtually unanimous in reading the opened side as the birth of the Church and the fountain of the sacraments. St. Augustine, treating this verse, observes that the Evangelist chose his word with care: he did not say the soldier struck or wounded the side, but opened it—aperuit—that there might be set open, in a manner, the gate of life, whence the sacraments of the Church flowed forth, without which there is no entrance to the life which is true life. And he draws the great Adamic parallel: as Eve was formed from the side of the sleeping Adam, so the Church, the Bride, is formed from the side of the Second Adam sleeping in death upon the Cross (In Joannis Evangelium, Tract. CXX; PL 35, 1953; CCSL 36). Augustine’s exact phrasing on the verb aperuit and the Eve typology should be collated against CCSL 36 before quotation.
The blood and the water the Fathers read sacramentally: the water of Baptism by which the Church is born, the blood of the Eucharist by which she is nourished. St. John Chrysostom likewise joins the two streams to the two sacraments, teaching that from these two the Church is constituted, and that the faithful are reborn by water and fed by blood (In Joannem, Hom. LXXXV; PG 59, 463). The attribution of the explicit baptism–water / Eucharist–blood pairing to this homily should be verified against the Greek text in PG. What the Collect names as infiniti dilectionis thesauri is here seen flowing in visible matter: the love is not only declared but poured.
The Evangelist closes by gathering two Scriptures to the event. Os non comminuetis ex eo—”You shall not break a bone of Him” (John 19:36; cf. Exod. 12:46; Ps. 33:21)—fulfilling the rubric of the Paschal lamb, so that the unbroken bones declare Christ the true Passover. And again, Videbunt in quem transfixerunt—”They shall look on Him whom they pierced” (John 19:37; cf. Zach. 12:10). This last word is the charter of the feast itself: the Church does precisely what the prophet foretold—she looks upon the pierced One, and in that looking adores.
IV. Thomistic Synthesis: Exitus and Reditus in the Pierced Heart
The two readings may be united upon the Thomistic axis of exitus and reditus—the going-forth of all things from God and their return to Him. In St. Thomas the whole of theology is ordered to this double motion: God as the principle from whom creatures proceed, and as the end to whom the rational creature returns (cf. Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, prooem.; I, q. 44–45 on the procession of creatures; I-II, prol. on the return).
The Epistle gives us the exitus under its highest form: the infinitos thesauros, the unsearchable riches of Christ, going forth from the hidden God per Ecclesiam to the nations and even to the angels. The eternal mystery, hidden from ages in God, breaks forth into the economy of grace. This is the divine charity proceeding outward, the love that surpasses knowledge condescending to be preached by the least of the saints.
The Gospel gives us the visible point of that procession: the opened side is the very aperture through which the riches are poured into time. And it gives us simultaneously the principle of the reditus: videbunt in quem transfixerunt. The return begins in the look. For St. Thomas charity is friendship with God grounded in the communication of His own beatitude (S.Th. II-II, q. 23, a. 1), and the proper act of the rational creature is to be drawn back to God by that very charity which God has first poured forth—caritas Dei diffusa est in cordibus nostris (Rom. 5:5). Thus the wound of the Heart is the hinge of the whole motion: the place where the exitus of divine love becomes visible matter—blood and water—and the place upon which the reditus of the looking soul is fixed. The Heart, opened, is at once the fountain from which we proceed in grace and the wound toward which we return in adoration.
The Collect therefore prays exactly this circle to be closed in us: that we who receive the infiniti thesauri from the wounded Heart may render devotae pietatis officia—the offices of devout piety—and so complete in love the movement that love began.
V. Devotional Application
The feast asks of the faithful, before all else, that they look. The whole devotion to the Sacred Heart is contained in the prophet’s word fulfilled at the Cross: they shall look on Him whom they pierced. To gaze upon the opened side is not a passing sentiment but the deliberate, recollected act by which the soul lets the breadth and length and height and depth of that love begin to surpass its knowing.
From this looking three dispositions follow naturally. The first is gratitude for the riches poured forth: the soul that grasps that Baptism and the Eucharist flow from this very wound will approach the sacraments no longer as routine but as draughts from an opened fountain. The second is reparation—the characteristic note of this devotion as it was unfolded through St. Margaret Mary—for the Collect names the Heart as wounded nostris peccatis, by our sins; the loving return seeks to console with devotion the love that was met with ingratitude. The third is indwelling: to pray with St. Paul, on this day above others, habitare Christum per fidem in corde meo, that the Heart adored upon the altar might take up its dwelling within.
A concrete practice befitting the feast is the slow, meditative recitation of the Litany of the Sacred Heart, pausing upon those invocations drawn straight from these readings—Cor Jesu, in quo sunt omnes thesauri sapientiae et scientiae; Cor Jesu, lancea perforatum; Cor Jesu, fons vitae et sanctitatis. So prayed, the litany becomes the soul’s own looking upon the pierced One.
VI. The Collect
Latin: Deus, qui nobis in Corde Fílii tui, nostris vulneráto peccátis, infinítos dilectiónis thesáuros misericórditer largíri dignáris: concéde, quǽsumus; ut, illi devótum pietátis nostrae praestántes obséquium, dignae quoque satisfactiónis exhibeámus offícium. Per eúndem Dóminum nostrum Iesum Christum.
English: O God, who in the Heart of Thy Son, wounded by our sins, dost mercifully deign to bestow upon us the infinite treasures of love: grant, we beseech Thee, that rendering Him the devout homage of our piety, we may likewise discharge the duty of worthy satisfaction. Through the same our Lord Jesus Christ.
This Collect is given as it stands in the proper of the feast in the 1962 Missale Romanum; it should be collated against a printed Missal before liturgical use.
VII. Aspiration
Cor Jesu, lancea perforátum, miserére nobis. Heart of Jesus, pierced with a lance, have mercy on us.
VIII. For Further Study
- St. Augustine, In Joannis Evangelium Tractatus CXX (PL 35; CCSL 36) — the aperuit of the side and the Eve–Church typology.
- St. John Chrysostom, In Epistolam ad Ephesios, Hom. VII, and In Joannem, Hom. LXXXV (PG 62; PG 59) — the manifold wisdom revealed through the Church, and the two streams as the two sacraments.
- St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, prooem.; II-II, q. 23, aa. 1–2 — the exitus–reditus structure and the nature of charity.
- Pope Pius XII, Haurietis Aquas (1956) — the magisterial synthesis of the devotion, drawing the patristic latus apertum tradition into doctrinal form; an indispensable companion to this feast.
- Pope Leo XIII, Annum Sacrum (1899) — the consecration of the human race to the Sacred Heart.
A note on sources: the patristic citations above are presented in paraphrase, not as verbatim quotation. The weakest-anchored attribution is the specific assignment of the explicit baptism–water / Eucharist–blood pairing to Chrysostom’s Hom. LXXXV in Joannem; the substance of the teaching is securely patristic and securely Chrysostomic in spirit, but the precise homily and wording should be verified against PG 59 before being printed as a direct citation. The Augustinian cruciform reading of Ephesians 3:18 and the aperuit exegesis should likewise be collated against CCSL before quotation. The Collect should be checked against a printed 1962 Missal.