Solemnity of Most Sacred Heart of Jesus
Today’s readings present the Lord Jesus to us as the Good Shepherd, the kind of shepherd who, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them would … leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after the lost one until he finds it. The shepherd, in ancient times, was a common image for a king, the shepherd of his people; Jesus, then, is the kind of king who does not will for any of his people to be lost, not even the wayward sheep who foolishly abandons the safety of the flock to wander off alone, where wolves and other predators lurk.
By economic and political measures, Jesus is a foolish shepherd, a foolish king. What shepherd with sense would abandon ninety-nine percent of his flock to go off after one sheep? Or what king would submit to death for the sake of subjects who had rejected him? A calculating logic would condemn what our Lord does. It is only love, which reveals the logic of God, that makes sense of Jesus’s self gift: as Paul says, only with difficulty does one die for a just person … But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. God’s way, which is to seek out the lost, bring back the strayed, bind up the injured, and heal the sick, radically challenges our assumptions about how the world works.
Today, let us consider how deeply the logic of God’s love has sunk into our hearts, ask forgiveness for the ways our hearts are still hardened, and pray that the Holy Spirit might shape our hearts to be more and more like that of Christ.