We have recently received a papal encyclical, Dilexit Nos, where the Holy Father, Pope Francis has contemplated the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a devotion that I am particularly fond of. This is, perhaps, why when I read the Gospel for today, all I could do was focus on the word heart which occurs in the Gospel reading.
As you have just heard, Our Lord was asked which was the greatest of all the many commandments which the Jews had to obey, and He responded:
The first is this:
Hear, O Israel!
The Lord our God is Lord alone!
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul,
with all your mind,
and with all your strength.
And so, we have this commandment which I would like to focus on today: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.”
How does one love the Lord Our God with all our heart? In Dilexit Nos Pope Francis teaches us that classical Greek culture – which we are heirs to – treated the heart, not only as the core of the body, but the soul and spirit as well (§3). You will notice that there is also something of this meaning in the commandment – we first hear of the heart, and then as if to indicate what the heart means we are told that it means with all our soul, our mind, and our strength – in other words, the heart is the core of all these things. Pope Francis also teaches that biblically, the heart is the place where there is no “deceit and disguise” (§5). To love God with all our heart, therefore, is to love Him above all things, not privileging other things – fame, pleasure, power, wealth – before him.
But this does not answer the question, how do we love Him with all our heart.
To answer this question, I would like to turn to the Arabic word for heart, qalb, and the many other words it operates as a root for. The heaving movement of the heart allows for the root qalb to be used for ploughing and turning over. Indeed, so powerful is the sense of this movement and turning, that qalb is also the root for the word that we in India know well, Inquilab, revolution. From this use in turning and ploughing, we can now see the heart not merely as an organ, but as soil which needs to be turned over – as one discussion on this word observed, the business of the heart (qalb) is to be turned (maqlub) so that it gives up and becomes free. We need to plough our hearts to see if there is anything else that we love above God. And if there is such a thing, then we need to weed it out of the field of our heart. Weed out those stones that make our heart stony and throw them away. Pull out those thorny weeds in our hearts and, to use imagery that Our Lord used, cast them into the fire (Mt 13:30). This is what we need to do with our hearts, plough it, and turn it over, preparing it like soil which needs to be turned over before it can receive, both the rain, as well as seed.
And what is the rain and the seed that this prepared heart will receive? There are so many phrases that one could pull out from the Bible which speak of the rain that God provides to water the earth, and cause grain to grow. Take, for instance, this verse from Job (5:10):
He gives rain on the earth
and sends waters on the fields;
Or these lovely verses from Psalm 65:9-10:
You visit the earth and water it,
you greatly enrich it;
the river of God is full of water;
you provide the people with grain,
for so you have prepared it.
You water its furrows abundantly,
settling its ridges,
softening it with showers,
and blessing its growth.
But the rain he sends, is not merely water – which could be read as the stream of water that flows from the Sacred Heart of Our Lord (Dilexit Nos § 104, 174, 219). There is another object that he rains down on us. Listen to this phrase from the book of Exodus where God tells Moses:
I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day…. (Ex 16:4)
God was true to his word to Moses and sent manna in the desert to the Israelites throughout the forty years of their wanderings in the desert. But this manna, was merely a shadow, a prefiguring, to use the technical word, of a more substantial bread that we can receive every day, but most certainly every Sunday: the Eucharist – the daily bread we pray for in the Our Father.
This is the seed that is rained down on our hearts. If we have ploughed the soil of our heart well, and one could well think of a good confession as a part of this act of ploughing, this holy seed plants itself in our hearts and makes our hearts a little bit more like the Sacred Heart of Jesus; the heart of the Son who loves His Father, and who loves us. A heart, that burns with love for us.
And there is some more good news! When we hear the phrase “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart”, we should remember that “this in no way”, as Dilexit Nos teaches us, “implies an undue reliance on our own abilities” (§30). Remember that the desire to love God has already been implanted in our hearts by our creator. As St. Augustine famously teaches “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” All the restlessness of our hearts, my dear brothers and sisters, is the restlessness that our hearts have to return to Our Father, and it is the Son, who through the gift of His Body will take our hearts to the Father, if only we do our bit, which is to turn over our lives, and to plough the field of our hearts – the act of sacramental confession. And even to do this bit, he provides us the graces we need. Indeed, we should know that when we plough our hearts, it is He who is holding the plough, and it is He who yokes Himself to the plough as He shares the burden with us, because He has promised us:
“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Mt 11: 28-30)
Let us then, my dear brothers and sisters, turn to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and say, and I would like you to repeat after me: “Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in Thee.” And again, “Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in Thee.”
(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the church of Our Lady of the Rosary, Fatorda on 2 Nov 2024.
Image Credit: “Manna Falling from Heaven”, Nüremberg Bible, 1400s.)
