Today, June 7, 2024, we celebrate the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, one of the fundamental axes of SSCC spirituality and in this context we share this text to accompany this ecclesial solemnity.
The Gospel of the Day of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Jn 19, 31-37) relates that, when Jesus was dead and crucified, “one of the soldiers pierced his side with his spear, and immediately blood and water flowed out.” The interpretation of the Fathers of the Church saw there a symbol of the Eucharist and baptism, whose power flows from the dead and risen Christ.
Today, when one thinks of blood, the wars that ravage Ukraine and the Gaza Strip immediately come to mind, with thousands of dead and displaced. And when one thinks about water, on the one hand, the tremendous floods in southern Brazil and other places in the world where climate change recurrently causes torrential rains, river overflows and flooding of populations, also with enormous losses, deaths and thousands of victims, and on the other hand, the droughts that devastate one region or another of the planet with increasing frequency. That is, blood and water that do not evoke something positive, a source of life and joy for us, like the sacraments of the Church, but rather the dark side of the human being, capable of endless barbarism, and of nature, tested to the point. extreme by predation and human neglect.
What will the pierced Heart of Jesus tell us today, with that sign of the blood and water that flow from his wound?
Perhaps it will remind us that that blood – that life – was shed for all, not for some or for many: for all. For the dead Ukrainian grandmother hugging her grandchildren and for the young Russian soldier who left his life in the bloody field; for the Palestinian mother screaming over the body of her dead son and for the young woman who went to a musical event and was murdered by Hamas fighters. And she will shout to us – her blood is hers –: May it not be in vain! May the insistence on peace be more persevering than the obsession with war!
Perhaps it will also remind us that water is, at the same time, the beginning of all life and, by ironic contrast, a terrible agent of death; which, channeled to water food or poured over a newborn at his baptism, is a necessary and life-giving element, but forced to move through inhabited places because there is no earth to absorb it, it can destroy everything in its path, creating panic, destruction and death. And he will remind us that, sooner than we would like, water will be – and is already! – the object of human greed when it becomes scarce to satisfy the growing population of the globe and is the cause of new conflicts.
Blood and water: pure life of God and, when the human being loses the horizon of love, pure death. May the Hearts of Jesus and Mary shake us again in these celebrations, so that the blood only evokes the Eucharist, sacrament of extreme love for one’s neighbor, and the water only evokes baptism, sacrament of full life, today and tomorrow; so that the Gospel does not fall into the void of human selfishness, nor into that of hopelessness.
Guillermo Rosas sscc / June 2024
