Today the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. While these kinds of devotions may seem to be something we associate only we the past, in fact we may need it more now than ever.
The Sacred Heart image is a representation of the love of God. In Christianity we talk a great deal about love, and in particular God's love. We talk about how God loves everybody. But it is precisely in this that God's love can easily become something impersonal, and somewhat abstract. Divine love gets reduced to a kind of passionless, generalized concern for the world by a God sitting somewhere up in heaven.
The image of the Sacred Heart with the crown of thorns, the fire, the blood, reminds us that the God of Christianity is a God who became incarnate, real flesh and blood, real feelings, real emotion. And when he ascended into heaven he did not leave his humanity behind. It is precisely because he took his humanity into heaven that we are able to enter heaven.
When we speak of God's love it is a passionate, truly heart felt love for each of us as individuals. The image of the sacred heart recalls not just the passion, but the true compassion of God. God who chose, and even now chooses to share our pains, our fears, our suffering, our worries. Why would God choose to open himself to so much suffering? Because this is how much he loves us, this is how much he wants to be one with us.
