Homily for Friday, 27 June 2014‒ Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

Readings of the day: Deuteronomy 7:6-11; Psalm 103:1-2, 3-4, 6-7, 8, 10; 1 John 4:7-16; Matthew 11:25-30

What does it mean for us to be “a people sacred to the LORD”? This is how Moses describes the people of Israel in our first reading today from Deuteronomy: “You are a people sacred to the LORD, your God.”

Today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Sacred Heart is sacred in its own right; under God’s own power. We cannot say the same thing of ourselves. Do we not owe our sacredness to God?

Our God has created us as a sacred people, and commissioned us from the moment of our baptism to “bring that dignity”; that sacredness “unstained into the everlasting life of heaven.” This is the prayer in the Rite of Baptism over the white garment with which we are clothed in the celebration of this sacrament. For the most part, we do well in maintaining the sacredness with which we are created; the dignity and holiness into which we have been baptized. Even so, do we not sin? Do not even the most holy people fail from time to time?

Our sacredness, unlike that of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ, depends on another; on God. We depend on God’s power; on God’s mercy. And so the Psalmist prays in thanksgiving: God “pardons all [our] iniquities, heals all [our] ills… Merciful and gracious is the LORD, slow to anger and abounding in kindness.”

God makes us sacred, just as God made the people of Israel under Moses sacred. God made Israel, “really the smallest of all nations”; an insignificant nation in constant exile and tumult in our Scriptures, a sacred people. The same is true for us.

And yet God does not stop at making us, God’s “little ones” as Jesus refers to us affectionately in our Gospel reading today, sacred. To be sacred; to have had revealed to us mysteries of faith “hidden… from the wise and the learned” carries with it responsibility.

Who are the “little ones” in greatest need of God’s presence, which makes them as well as us sacred? Who are the people who need our forgiveness or who try our patience; whom we do not or have not fully acknowledged their sacredness; God’s presence in them? Who is in special need among us of our prayer that they might bring their God-given “dignity unstained into the everlasting life of heaven”?

And, first of all, to whom are we grateful, especially on this Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ? We are grateful to God, whom we gather here to worship; who has made us “a people sacred to the LORD.”