Reflection
The whole history of salvation, through to our own day, is one history depicting God’s great love to humanity. God creates us and the world around us out of his great love and wants us to live his life here on earth and join him in the fullness for eternity. Even when we disobey God and distance ourselves from his will, God still loves us and, like a loving caring parent, still reaches out to us. The prophet Hosea speaks of this love. At times God feels the need to chastise us for having abandoned him, yet the heart of God recoils at this thought!
Paul tells the Christians in Ephesus about the greatness of God’s love for them. Paul hopes that we get to know and appreciate God’s love for us, a love that is beyond all knowledge! The extent of the breadth, length, height and depth of God’s love can only be remotely experienced through Christ on the cross. God loves the world so much that he gives up his only begotten Son, allowing him to die on the cross. True love is demonstrated when one is ready to give up one’s life for his or her friends, like Jesus did on the cross.
Further Reading
The Servant of God Joseph De Piro spoke about the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the seat of God’s love, both in his sermons and in the Saint Paul: Almanac of the Institute of Missions. The Sacred Heart saves us continuously.
Permeated with divine love, De Piro, either personally or through others, could not help but continuously speak to his sisters and brothers, in Malta, abroad or in ad gentes countries, about this great love. De Piro continuously evangelised this faith that was the foundation of western civilisation and of the wholistic amelioration of humanity, introducing among us values of liberty, life and light.
“Where does this divine love, that comes down from heaven, dwell?” asks the Servant of God in one of his sermons, “it dwells in the Sacred Heart – the most noble part of human nature that is united to divine nature; the most Sacred Heart of Jesus. We know that the rudder controls the ship; similarly, the divine heart full of love from heaven, manages Jesus’ thoughts, words and actions. It is not surprising that scripture says of Jesus that ‘he went around doing good.’”
Even if Jesus had not been crucified, there would still have been a space for the devotion to the Heart of Jesus. In order to redeem us, it would have been enough for the Sacred Heart to enable Jesus to do those acts which were at the same time human and divine, by providing the body of Jesus with the blood it needed; because each of our Lord Jesus Christ’s action has an infinite value. Thus he would have saved us without any suffering. However, the suffering Sacred Heart reveals the perfection of Jesus’ love, “Jesus would have never accepted to spare, even one droplet of the blood that made his divine heart function.”