St. Luke’s Gospel about the lost sheep that we have just heard makes sense for the Feast of the Sacred Heart.
Why is there more joy in heaven for a single sinner who is converted that for the ninety-nine that do not need conversion? As if the lost sheep or the sinner were worth more than the other. Here, we touch the mystery of love that puts an infinite price on all, but also on each one of us. Since love is inexhaustible it may be shared without losing its substance; the opposite of love is not hatred but jealousy, which makes one believe that love shared with others means loss.
Unfortunately, twisted jealousy is frequent: the Pharisees and doctors of the law who do not accept that Jesus is eating with publicans and sinners, or who simply do not tolerate that Jesus eats with any one other than themselves. It exists everywhere, and do not let us say too quickly that we do not have our share of it.
The Feast of the Sacred Heart teaches us to love in a human way by contemplating the way God loves us. How is that?
In the spiritual tradition we often speak about the Incarnation as if God, places himself on our human, sensible level, so that we may return to him by leaving the level where we are, for without God’s coming, we should not be able to do it. There is a kind of exchange between the divine and the human: God is made man so that we may become God.
But the Gospel invites us to go even further: if we can become like God, it is because God is like us, and by observing how God acts, we may learn how we should be.
Jesus reveals the Father in his human way of being, and the Father sets an infinite price on each one to the point of leaving everything to seek and find the one who is lost. That is what we ourselves must learn in order to exist, or, to put it in another way, to be delivered from jealousy in order to be plunged into that love that gives the other his or her fullest price.
