The Sacred Heart of Jesus
Christianity always involves an interplay between the whole of creation and particular symbols—revelatory, canonical symbols, centring on the story of Jesus. We are Christians, not in order to be fixated on the story of Jesus, but to be inspired and empowered by it—inspired and empowered to live out our own distinctive intimacy with the one whom Jesus called Abba.
Which brings us to the idea of the heart. Each of us has a heart. That sentence, while stating more than an obvious physical truth, is nevertheless not a claim that each of us is warm and affectionate. Rahner is well aware that our hearts can be empty of love. Each of us has a heart, rather, in a more speculative sense. Human beings are not just material objects or animals: we are self-conscious, spiritual creatures. Yet we find our identity, our sense of who we are, only gradually. And this happens through interaction with others, and in no other way. Here, then, there is a parallel with what has been said on revelation. Just as revelation involves an interplay between particular symbols and an indefinite range of created reality, so our personal identity involves an interplay between our silent centre and the indefinite range of our encounters with the other.
‘Heart’ names what holds the diversity of our lives together as ours, the silent centre from which all our interactions flow.
Now, if Jesus is the revealer, and if revelation is heart-shaped, it follows that to talk of Jesus’s ‘heart’ is to name his special, revelatory significance. Jesus’s divinity, Jesus’s divine sonship, Jesus’s mighty deeds and powerful teaching—these are not there simply as objects of admiration or devotion, but rather as resources for our transformation, for us to appropriate ever more deeply our identity as God’s children. Moreover, if Jesus’s heart is pierced, this reminds us that his own identity is bound up with the mystery of sin and cruelty….
Christianity is a commitment to growth and transformation, thought our dealings with God’s world. In Rahner’s strict, non-romantic sense, it engages the heart. The heart of Jesus—‘symbol of love’s triumph’—is the guarantee that the process, for all its risk and pain, will end in blessedness.
From “Karl Rahner and the Heart of Christ” The Month (1997)
Karl Rahner
We look at the heart of the Lord and the question that is decisive for eternity fills our innermost being, our innermost heart and life: Do you love me? Do you love me in such a way that this love generates a blessed eternity, that it truly, powerfully and invincibly generates my everlasting life? This question is not answered because the answer would no longer be a secret; we could give it to ourselves. The question enters the mystery that has come near to us in the heart of the Lord. But when it enters this heart, because it is asked with faith, hope and love, that question is not answered but overpowered by the mystery that is love, by the unquestionable reality of the mystery of God….
It is impossible properly to teach devotion to the Sacred Heart. With confidence in the Church and the Spirit, we must try to approach its mystery. We must eventually, in the luminous and in the dark hours of life, try to pray: ‘Heart of Jesus, have mercy on me.’ We should perhaps try to practice a prayer like the Jesus prayer of the Russian pilgrim. We might venture to use this word like a mantra in Eastern style meditation. But over and above all that, we must experience in life that it is most improbable, most impossible, and so most evident that God, the incomprehensible, truly loves us and that in the heart of Jesus Christ this love has become irrevocable.
From Theological Investigations 23 (1992)
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