07/06/2024

All Feasts Days of the Institutional Church are in celebration of God's love for his creation. "Greater love has no man than he give up his life for the sake of his friends". The ultimate sign of God's Love for us is the abandonment of his own being, the emptying of his power and glory, to become human in body and soul exactly as we are. Jesus is thus "begotten not made". 

We are begotten of our human parents. Jesus' mother is Mary Immaculate,  the sinless one prepared by God to become the womb where God became man and grew for nine months before his birth. She is Theotokos and in her body the embryonic Jesus passed through all the stages of human growth, which we share with all mammals, before being born. It was in this embryo that the Sacred Heart of Jesus was first formed.

The passage from Hosea was written seven or eight hundred years before the birth of Christ. It is a warning that God's message to Moses and the Israelites was still in effect and that they should always live lives directed to righteousness.

St Paul prays with the Ephesians that we can be confident that the revelations of The Father have been completed and that Paul has the special grace to "explain" the mystery that is the complete Christ living in our souls; breadth, length, height and depth can be filled by the holiness that is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

St John is the eye-witness that did not desert his crucified Lord. He was there when the crucified corpse was accepted by Mary and the other women. Before that he had seen the water and blood flow from the heart of the pierced one. The physical heart of Jesus had stopped and the hearts of his followers were desolate and hopeless in their unknowing.

Today's feast celebrates the resurrection of the Heart that continues to beat and is the first fruits of the New Creation that will be inaugurated by the Second Coming when we all can be filled with the utter fulness of God.

Dear Lord, the world in which I live has all the hallmarks of the last years of the Old Testament. We are all captivated by Mammon and our own persons and we are even worse than they. Tiny hearts of many are destroyed by their own parents before they ever see the light. Our Hierarchs have very rarely taken on the detachment from the things of this world which you declared to be essential if we are to do the will of your Father. Your "chosen people" have lost their respect for you and perpetrate unbelievable acts of cruelty. Let me pray for the forgiveness of my sins and let the whole world come to a similar acceptance of guilt knowing that our individual deaths end our only chance of being true to your creative love, symbolised in your Sacred Heart. God have mercy on us! Amen.