Litany of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
by Ottavio De Bertolis
«The Lord is good and merciful, slow to anger and great in love [...]. He does not treat us according to our sins, he does not repay us according to our faults. As the sky is high above the earth, so is his mercy towards those who fear him" (Ps 103, 8. 10-11). Jesus is the image of the Father, the imprint of his substance: «No one has ever seen God; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has revealed" (Jn 1, 18).
The Son shows in all his words and in all his actions that goodness and love that are proper to God, those confessed by the faith of Israel: in this sense, he reveals in his flesh, that is, in his body, the One who, invisible to the eyes, Israel confesses one God and one Lord.
We can say that Jesus "summarizes" God, in the sense that he condenses in every moment of his life, narrated by the Gospels, making present the faithfulness and power of God, his faithful love. For this reason we also find wonderful images in the Old Testament that we can certainly apply to Jesus. Let's think of the prophet Hosea: «I taught Ephraim to walk, holding him by the hand, but they did not understand that I cared for them. I drew them with bonds of goodness, with bonds of love; I was to them like one who lifts a child to his cheek; I bent over him to feed him" (Hos 11, 3-4). Of course these words tell of God's love for Israel, and are like a synthesis of its history, a story of God's inexhaustible love and of the people's infidelity: but, if we think about it, are they not also the story of Jesus with those who did he encounter, to whom he manifested, with words and gestures, the infinite goodness and love of God, which were at work in Him? So we could, in the light of this beautiful litany on which we reflect, read all the pages, I would say the individual words, of each Gospel, and see in them, as if against the light, this fullness of goodness and love.
It should be noted that Scripture was not written out of intellectual curiosity, or simply to know what happened, but rather to act as a mirror to us; that is, so that we could recognize ourselves in all that suffering humanity that turns to Jesus, so that, many centuries later, we can relive the same experience, because Jesus is perennially alive and life-giving in the Holy Spirit, and what he did so many years ago he continues to do it to us, and thus shows us again the love and goodness of God, the Father, which are present in Him. So we are, for example, the forgiven sinner, or the healed lepers, or the healed demoniac, or the published man called to follow him. In fact, "everything that was written before us was written for our instruction" (Rom 15:4): it instructs us on what we are called to live and can experience. If we have not experienced each and every episode of the Gospel on our own skin, that is, in our life, as if referring to ourselves, we would have a knowledge of Jesus more through hearsay than a true and real knowledge of Him, which is knowledge not only in the head, but above all in life.
I said that Jesus manifests God's love with what he does and what he says: it's true, but it's limiting. In fact, it is above all when Jesus no longer says or does anything, that is, when he suffers, and above all when he is crucified, that his goodness and love for him are manifested to the highest degree. In those pages we can contemplate what that "he loved them to the end" means (Jn 13:1), that is, that "to the end" of his love. it is that "to the end" of what we can become, it is that "to the end" of that faithfulness that He reveals to us in himself. The stories of the passion show us a gallery of characters, who are us, live in us, and He allows himself to be abandoned, betrayed, sold, humiliated, insulted. It is in his silence and in his condescension to what we wanted to do with him that that inexhaustible fullness of goodness and love that flows from the very mystery of God is revealed.
It should then be noted that we contemplate this goodness and love precisely in the Heart of Christ. The evangelist tells us that when "he was already dead, [...] one of the soldiers struck his side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out" (Jn 19, 33-34). Jesus gave life when he was dead; it was like a sack torn open, which is emptied to the end. If his death was a source of life for us, what will his life itself be for us, He who is now alive and intercedes for us with the Father? In fact, all the gestures and words with which he showed his goodness and love for him were effective by virtue of the Resurrection, that is, they were like anticipated signs of his lordship over evil and death, of that victory that he would receive from Father. And it is through that victory that the same goodness and love continue for us to be victorious over the evil and death that surround us, so that every day we can experience within ourselves the extraordinary effectiveness of his power towards us believers.