Christ's Sorrow
But
Christ was also the most sorrowful of men. He saw, as no one else could,
the full, profound horror of sin, its ugliness, foulness, loathsomeness. He saw
the constant inclinations to sin in men, even in the best men. He saw the
dominion of the devil over men, and the constant readiness of men to accept
that dominion and to reject Christ. "All seek the things that are their
own, not the things that are Christ's." (Phil. II.21.) Particularly in
Gethsemane, He allowed this vision of sin to fill His Heart with bitter
anguish. And for Him, this ugliness of sin was not the general, abstract thing
that it must remain for us, for He saw all sin, all sins, in all their hideous
details; He saw each of those sins steaming up as an unholy vapour against the
face of His Father; He saw them descending upon Himself as blows, insults,
scourges, nails, agony inflicted upon His own Person. He used His divine power
and the powers given to His human nature to prevent this flood of ugliness,
shame and insult from inundating and crushing His human heart during most of
His life (as a thoughtful man will conceal a toothache so as not to cause
embarrassment to his friends). But from the moment of entry into the garden to
the last sigh on the cross, He allowed that flood of iniquity to work its full
cruel power over His tender Heart.
By
becoming man, He placed man in an altogether new relation to God, because man
now became able to rejoice and to gladden the Heart of God. The blows of the
lashes, and particularly the insensitive cruelty of mind from which the
flogging sprang, these things had the power to hurt God Himself. And that hurt
was inflicted, not only two thousand years ago by men now dead; it is inflicted
by you and me today. We still have the power to rejoice and to sadden the Heart
of God, because His Passion goes on to the end of time—though how, we know not.
So Christ asks us, in reparation
for our past faults and neglect and coldness, to join Him in His sorrows, to
stop the insensitive cruelty we have shown Him; He asks us to return love for
love; He asks us to take our stand not with the executioners, torturers and
evil judges, but with Mary and John, to join Him in sorrow at the cross; this
also we can do, for the Passion goes on to the end of time. He asks us now to
share in the profound sorrows of His Heart that we may one day share fully in
His joys, or rather in His joy, the mysterious joy of living in the bosom of
the Triune God.
We
have here a simple way of summing up the essentials of devotion to the Sacred
Heart. The essence of it is to give every possible joy to the Heart of the
Man-God, and to avoid, as far as we can, giving Him pain; to share as fully as
we can in His sorrows that we may share in His joy. To live by this effort is
to join constantly, and ever more and more intimately, in the joys, the
sorrows, the aspirations of the Heart of Christ. Now the one force that enables
us to enter into another person's joys and sorrows is love. Love enables
us to know others, to know their mind and heart, with a kind of knowledge that
can be acquired by no other way than love. Without in any way belittling the
formal study of theology, we can say that no knowledge acquired of Christ
through books can compare with the knowledge that comes through faithful,
persevering love; and this is true even of those who, on account of their
duties, are obliged to obtain knowledge of Him through books. Love unlocks the
heart, not only of him who loves but also of the beloved, and brings one into
the inner recesses of the beloved's mind and heart. This is the meaning of the
saying attributed to Aquinas that he had learnt more from his crucifix than
from his books.
God
the Son gave Himself a human heart that He might as a man enter fully into the
human emotions of joy and sorrow; He gave Himself a perfect heart that He might
experience all that sorrow and joy perfectly. He gives us that perfect
heart that we may be able to feel all He feels with His perfect heart. In
return, He asks that we give Him our heart, not that He would take
anything away from us, but that He may fill our heart, as He filled His own—fill
it first with sorrow that He may later fill it to the very brim with joy. In
proportion as we give Him our heart, He gives us the thoughts and feelings of
His heart; His heart and ours become one, and Christ and the Christian
become one in perfect love. So we can arrive at the highest happiness possible
on this earth—a truly personal appreciation of the personal love which the
Heart of Christ has for each man.
