Sermon for the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart

preached by Fr Christopher Woods at the Convent of St Mary the Virgin, Wantage on Friday 27 June 2025

“They will look on the one whom they have pierced.”

On this day, we look. We look, like the Beloved Disciple, at the pierced side of Christ. We look, like the holy women standing at the foot of the Cross. We look, like the mystics and martyrs, nuns and poets, peasants and prophets through the centuries. We look—and in looking, we do not find condemnation, but love.

This is the mystery we celebrate in the Feast of the Sacred Heart: that God has loved us to the end—even unto the piercing of his own body. “Dilexit nos,” Pope Francis reminds us in his recent encyclical: He has loved us. The Sacred Heart is not a sentimental symbol or a private piety. It is the revelation of divine love, made visible in the broken and opened body of Jesus.

And here’s the startling truth: love is not just something that God feels. Love is what God is. Not distant. Not abstract. But flowing, aching, wounded and radiant. Love that bleeds. Love that burns. Love that bears all things and believes all things.

In Zechariah’s prophecy, we hear of a day when God will pour out “a spirit of compassion and supplication,” and people will mourn for the one they have pierced. It’s a startlingly tender image: that mourning leads to cleansing. That grief opens the path to grace. “On that day,” says the prophet, “a fountain shall be opened… to cleanse them from sin and impurity.” This is no ordinary mourning. This is the sorrow of the world turning back to the heart of God—tears that become water for healing. In the Sacred Heart, we are offered not judgment but a fountain of mercy.

And so it is in John’s Gospel, with a detail so simple and so loaded with meaning: “One of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out.” These are not just medical phenomena. This is the new Eve born from the side of the new Adam. This is the Church, emerging not from triumph but from the wound. This is Eucharist and Baptism, life and love, pouring out for the life of the world. What the spear opens is not only flesh—it opens the very heart of God.

And St Paul, writing to the Ephesians, prays that they may “have the power to comprehend… what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.” Such a beautiful contradiction: to know what cannot be known. To grasp something so vast, so tender, so fierce and so full, that it spills over the edges of reason. Paul’s language is almost architectural—breadth, length, height, depth—as though love itself is the new temple we are invited to enter.

Pope Francis, in Dilexit Nos, makes this bold claim: that “the devotion to the Sacred Heart is not a relic of the past, but a spiritual path for our time.” In a world riven by violence, division, cynicism, and exhaustion, the Sacred Heart speaks of something deeper. It is an antidote to indifference. It is a protest against despair. It is the wellspring of mission.

He says: “From the pierced side of the Lord, streams of mercy flow to all. The Sacred Heart is not a reminder of pain, but a pledge of love.”

This is important. We are not just invited to meditate on a heart pierced—we are called to be shaped by it. Formed by love. Animated by compassion. And yes, sometimes wounded in loving. Because if we truly drink from this fountain, we cannot remain the same.

To live by the Sacred Heart is to live vulnerably. To choose mercy when revenge seems easier. To remain faithful when the world is bored with commitment. To weep over injustice. To serve where there is no reward. To believe in the possibility of new life, even in the ruins.

For a community like this one—rooted in prayer, shaped by the Gospel, vowed to love—this Feast speaks deeply. For you, the Sacred Heart is not simply an image on a holy card. It is the pattern of your life. A daily surrender. A rhythm of intercession. A quiet witness to the world’s aching need for love that does not give up. It says to the world outside “A relationship not shaped by the heart is incapable of overcoming the fragmentation caused by individualism” (Pope Francis, Dilexit Nos)

And perhaps today, as we gaze on the pierced side of Christ, we are reminded that this love is not something we earn or achieve. It is gift. It is grace. It is already ours. “He has loved us.” Not He might, not He will if we behave, but He has. As the mystics knew so well, we are invited not to earn this love, but to let it in.

So let us come again to the side of Christ. Let us look, and weep, and be cleansed. Let us open our own hearts—fractured though they are—and ask that they be shaped anew by his. For in that Sacred Heart, all our wounds are met by mercy. In that Sacred Heart, all fear is drowned in love.

Amen.

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Sermon for Corpus Christi Sunday 2025