The Sacred Heart of Jesus is the burning furnace of divine love

June is the month the Church sets aside for the celebration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This has always been one of my favorite devotions and I love all the traditional trappings that adorn it. The iconographic images, the novenas, and the emphasis upon the bottomless love and mercy of Christ have always moved me.

Lately, however, I have been drawn to the emphasis this devotion places on the humanity of Jesus, as I consider our era as one marked by an anthropological crisis. And with the emerging threat of artificial intelligence, this crisis will only grow more acute. What is a human being? What is special about us? What is our unique dignity as creatures made in the image and likeness of God? What is consciousness? Is there such a thing as a spiritual soul within us?

The Anthropological Crisis

Allow me to establish the crisis we face before I conclude with why I think the Sacred Heart devotion is more timely now than ever before. I begin with a quote from the late Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, from Razing the Bastions:

Success, said Martin Buber, is not one of the names of God. But one of his names is consuming fire, and the Son came to cast this fire upon the earth. Is it possible that in today’s drought that fire should no longer have anything to consume?

This is indeed a curious quote since it hints at a theme I have hammered away at in these pages for many years now: the modern era is characterized by something far deeper than a mere intellectual atheism. That is, it is animated by far more than a simple denial that God exists. It is characterized instead by an anemic inability to ask any real questions at all, mainly because it deems all questions about the metaphysical depths of the really real to be meaningless drivel; an indigestible gruel of hocus pocus mixed with philosophical intellectual onanism. Therefore, even the thundering atheism of Nietzsche struggles to find a foothold on the steep slopes of modernity’s hegemonic techno-pragmatism that feels it no longer needs such pointless metaphysical fulminations.

But is this not ironically also what Nietzsche saw coming? That the death of God portends far more than a “mere atheism” and harkens instead toward two opposite, but related, possibilities: Either the heights of a Dionysian renaissance with a heroic retrieval of the elemental entelechy of desire, or a descent into a form of humanity incapable of doing or achieving anything at all.

Even though modernity’s visible plumage is indeed mottled with a variety of different colored splotches of atheistic discourse, Nietzsche saw beyond these superficialities and understood that the feathers of modernity, the coloration of which is designed for mere outward preening, is of no importance, and that what is concealed underneath is a desiccated and moribund bird, flightless and feckless, and perched precariously on a high precipice. But this height was achieved long ago through what is today an impossible flight, and now the only possible movement is downward toward an unknown abyss.

In the past, the kind of existential desiccation one encountered was not so total and usually resulted in a recombustion of some kind of faith, since the presence of such dried combustibles needed only a small spark to ignite a winnowing and purging fire. After all, a raging inferno that covers thousands of miles can be set off by a single match, and in the Church’s long history, there have been many such single matches tossed into the dry field of the Church by many a saint. And such past revivals and reforms have counted on the spiritual aridity of the culture as a kind of preparation for the fire of the gospel. Because when there is little spiritual water, people will thirst for it, whether they know this explicitly or not.

However, the problem with modernity is that even as we die of thirst, we have genetically modified ourselves in our very core to never feel thirsty. Along these lines, as the quote from Balthasar points out, we may have reached a stage of desiccation that has gone beyond a mere “dryness” and has now progressed to the stage of a lifeless desert devoid of anything living or dead. There is nothing left to burn, nothing that can be set on fire by anything. All that can then be hoped for is an unexpected rainfall from above that will germinate seeds that have been long dormant in the desert sand. The human soul, though covered over with the wind-driven dunes of a suffocating materialistic immanentism, may yet germinate again, but before there can be the fires of revival, there must be first a life-giving rain.

Therefore, this is the burning pastoral question of our time, or at least it should be. Namely, given the deep nullification of the very question of God and the profound attenuation of our religious sense that this nullification has generated, what should be the nature of the “rain” the Church wishes to pour upon the seemingly dead desiccation of modernity?

Grace from above and the humanity of Jesus

The first thing to note is that rain “comes from above” and descends to the earth below. The Church, viewed only as a historical and sociological phenomenon, is “from below” and, from all outward appearances, differs little in her organizational form from the various bureaucratic power structures of the world. Even the Petrine ministry, if it is divorced from the Marian and Johannine elements of the Church (i.e., her spiritual element), becomes like a monstrous hypertrophied head, totally out of proportion to the rest of the body.

This will not do. Therefore, what we need now is for the Church to model and make eschatologically present that which is “from above but descends to what is below”. In other words, and leaving now the rain metaphor behind, we need a Church focused on the kenotic aspects of the Incarnation. Such kenosis is the very essence of the love and mercy of God that the Sacred Heart devotion highlights so beautifully.

The concept of kenosis is, of course, Pauline in origin. In his letter to the Philippians Paul, most likely quoting an early Christian creedal hymn, famously wrote that Christ:

Who, though he was in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied [ἐκένωσεν] himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death–even death on a cross. (2:6-8)

Who could have expected the epiphany of this crucified God whose grace, rained from above, becomes one with the parched earth below? This God, whose very intra-divine life of tri-personal love is marked by a circumincession of love that is the foundational condition of possibility for its expression ad extra in the economy of salvation?

Numerous attempts have been made down through the ages to “soften the blow” of this radical connection between the forsaken and crucified Christ and the very nature of God himself. After all, how can the immutable God enter into time without becoming as mutable as his creation? These are indeed thorny theological and philosophical questions, but whatever their resolution might be, it must not be allowed to sever the link between who God is in himself and how God manifests this in the economy of salvation. For as Jesus himself states, bluntly and without any further nuanced qualifications: “Whoever sees me sees the Father” (Jn 14:9).

But what does it mean “to see” Jesus? Most fully it means that through the eyes of faith, and not worldly wisdom of either the religious or philosophical sort, we are enabled by the grace that comes from above and falls to us below to apprehend that it is precisely in the humanity of Jesus that we see what God is like and, in the light of this, who we really are too.

As Vatican II states (Gaudium et Spes 22), “In reality it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear.” The basic datum of Revelation is God as revealed in and through the humanity of Christ, but also what it means for us to be fully human.

This kenosis is the stumbling block for the Jews (a religious objection) and apparent “foolishness” to the Greeks (philosophical) that Paul spoke of (1 Corinthians 23). Here, Paul is acknowledging that from a purely human perspective, the Christian claim is an outrageous and audacious one. Nevertheless, he presses forward and insists that our preaching must be grounded in nothing other than Christ crucified and risen. (1Cor. 2:2)

The burning furnace of divine love

Then, then, is the entire trajectory of salvation history and the pattern of Revelation is the pedagogy of kenosis. The Sacred Heart of Jesus is the burning furnace of divine love wherein this pedagogy of kenosis is revealed in the humanity of Christ as one who lives solely pro nobis. He descends into the depths of human sin and Satan’s sting–death, followed by a descent into the moldering silence of the tomb. He descends even further, as St. Peter tells us, into hell (or sheol), which he then “harrows”, claiming the souls of the righteous dead who awaited his triumph.

In this kenotic process, his heart is wounded with the sufferings of love, and his physical heart is pierced with a sword, and from his side blood and water pour forth, which is where the Church is born. More than that, it is where the Church must reside in her eschatological interregnum as a pilgrim who sojourns with sinners who also find their residence in the pierced heart of the Lord.

Mary is the symbol of this engraced humanity, and as was predicted, her Immaculate Heart too is pierced with the sword of love’s suffering for sinners. The Church also resides in her heart, and if she is to imitate Mary’s perpetual obediential fiat, she too must take her place at the foot of the crucified one.

What is revealed in this economy of salvation, in its pedagogy of kenosis, is that the Church must take up the way of kenosis, the way of the cross, in all that she does. This is no mere metaphor for ascetical detachment, but a concrete commandment. We are to love others as Christ first loved us, and Christ loves us via the pathway of descent into the wealth of poverty.

This requires that we follow the example of Christ’s Sacred Heart, which “unshielded” itself from the immunity of privilege. Balthasar, in The Glory of the Lord IV, refers to this as Christ’s “valor of the unshielded heart”:

But … the situation in which this truth emerges is now that of suffering … which lays man bare in his vulnerability, forcibly exposing and humiliating him. Only a great and majestic human being is equal to this; he alone can bear such a burden, and only from him, when he is finally and necessarily broken apart, can there arise, like a fragrance, the pure essence of humankind, indeed, of being as such. What is unprecedented here is that the suffering is neither denied (declared to be only apparent and philosophically reduced), nor is it shunned for the sake of an unattainable eudaimonia, but rather the way of man to god and the revelation of the deep truth of existence passes directly through the most extreme form of suffering. That is the valor of the unshielded heart, which philosophy will lack, and which stands in a direct relation to Christ.

This also is the heart and soul of the “universal call to holiness” famously promulgated by Vatican II, but which awaits a full theological unpacking of all that it entails. We are all called to have the “valor of unshielded hearts” that claim no privilege beyond that of others. We are to “harrow” our time and space, to kenotically descend, with pierced hearts wounded by our unshielded encounter with our neighbors who, through a lack of understanding, will quite often resist us with a darkness that cannot comprehend the light that we shine, the light of Christ’s cross.

The form of this holiness is intercessory, and our sufferings are purgative for the sins of ourselves and all others, as we mysteriously participate as members of Christ’s body, in the propitiatory sacrifices of suffering love.

Finally, the Feast of the Sacred Heart stands as the full unfolding of the “rain from above,” which alone can cause the desiccated desert of modernity to bloom again in an explosion of color. And this is so because in an era that is on the cusp of an anthropological implosion, the Church’s unsettling and revolutionary “memory” of Christ’s humanity will appear fresh and repristinating again.

In the era of artificial intelligence and the materialistic reduction of human nature to a plastic piece of “digital meat”, the Church may yet emerge as the true savior of the entire realm of the human. Indeed, it will emerge as its only savior, but only insofar as she finds her residence, along with the Virgin Mary, in the pierced and wounded heart of Christ.

If she does this, then the flightless and feckless desiccated bird of modernity, perched on its untenable precipice, may yet again take flight and soar into the heavens.