“It was not because you are the largest of all nations that the LORD set his heart on you and chose you,” Moses tells the Israelites in today’s first reading from Deuteronomy. Rather, he says, “It was because the LORD loved you and because of his fidelity to the oath he had sworn your fathers.” Here, in God’s revelation to Israel, the mystery of divine love is presented as a love that is faithful and merciful. Such a love calls the people to a response of fidelity to God and of mercy toward one another.
In Jesus Christ, the faithful and merciful love of God is made incarnate. Here, God’s love reaches us through the love of a human heart, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, intimately united with his divinity. Coming to us as the God-Man, Jesus can thus say to us, as he does in today’s Gospel, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves.” We will find true rest, true salvation, in putting on Christ and his way of being (Rom 13:14; cf. Phil 2:5–11; Col 3:12–16), in letting ourselves be clothed in him (Gal 3:27).
Today’s second reading from the First Letter of John teaches us that in concrete terms, putting on the yoke of Christ means to “love one another.” Such love entails a life of forgiveness, mercy, compassion, humility, even the embrace of the Cross. And if we do this, if we remain in this love, then “God remains in us, and his love is brought to perfection in us.”
Today, let us ask that our hearts might be transformed after the pattern of the Lord’s own Sacred Heart, that we might be made perfect in His love.