Divine Mercy: The Heart of the Gospel

66 Divine Mercy: The Heart Of The Gospel Whatever we may say about other human hearts, this person, Jesus of Nazareth, has a Heart that is aflame with love: love for His heavenly Father, and love for us. That is why He showed His physical Heart to St. Margaret Mary as flaming with fire, surmounted by a cross, and pierced and surrounded by thorns. All of these were clear signs and symbols that this Heart - the person o f Jesus Christ - is pure love: the Sacred Heart o f Jesus as all love and all lovable. That is also why one o f the great theologians o f our century, Cardinal Luigi Ciappi, OP, defined the devotion to the Sacred Heart in terms of the loving person o f Jesus Christ: Devotion to the Sacred Heart is nothing other than veneration for the person o f Jesus Christ because o f His love for sinful humanity, symbolized by the physical Heart of the Redeemer.22 Our task in this devotion is to try to return love for love: by the grace and fire of His Holy Spirit, to love our Lord back fo r all o f His infinite, generous, and tender love fo r us. However, there is another way we can view the Sacred Heart of Jesus. St. Catherine of Siena put it best back in the Middle Ages that God’s love always crosses a bridge of mercy to reach us.23 In other words, the Sacred Heart o f Jesus is all love, but the form that love takes when it reaches out to human beings is merciful love. For mercy is com­ passionate love; mercy is love that seeks to overcome and relieve all the miseries of others. St. Thomas Aquinas defined “mercy” as “the com­ passion in our hearts for another person’s misery, a compassion which drives us to do what we can to help him.”24 Divine Mercy, therefore, is the form that our Lord’s love for us takes when He meets our need and our brokenness. Whatever the name o f our misery may be - sin, guilt, suffering, or death - the Heart of Jesus is always ready to pour out His merciful, compassionate love for us, to help in time o f need. In fact, God’s love for His creatures always takes the form of merci­ ful love. As we read in the Psalms (24:10), “all the ways of the Lord are mercy and truth;” and again (144:9), “His tender mercies are over all His works.” When He created the world “ex nihilo,” therefore, and holds it in being at every moment, it is an act o f merciful love: His mer­ ciful love overcoming the potential nothingness, the possible non-exis­ tence o f all things. When the divine Son became incarnate and dwelt among us, that was an act o f merciful love too: His merciful love in