The Sacred Heart and the Person of Christ

“What inspires you about the image of the Sacred Heart?”

I’ll try and make this quick.  Partially because I’m no authority on this kind of thing but mostly because I hope the bulk of what you will learn about the Sacred Heart will not come from me but from the saints, the sacraments, and the pursuit of the virtuous life in Christ.

To review, the image of the Sacred Heart shows a bleeding human heart wrapped with a crown of thorns and crowned with a wreath of flames which itself encircles a cross at its top.  The imagery of a heart as the seat of love is not unfamiliar to us: the heart moves the body but is also the seat of passion, and in this way it represents both the convictions moving the soul and the movement or love of the soul towards its good.  But Jesus does not move alone; His person is at all times caught up in the perfect union and intimate dance of the Trinity so that his human nature, like ours, loves with the grace of the Holy Spirit and according to the direction of the Father.  

John calls Him the word, and our Lord himself reveals he is the son of God.  Thomas Aquinas says that “whenever we understand… there proceeds something within us, which is a conception of the object understood … and [this conception] is called the word of the heart” (I:27:i).  He explains that in the eternal procession of the divine intellect, this “word of the heart” of God is the second person of the Trinity, Jesus, who is the Father’s knowledge of himself.  And so we see Christ in a powerful way is the conviction which motivates the heart of God.  In turn the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, is the love of God, and proceeds similarly to how we move ourselves to love according to our understanding, except in the Trinity it is the Father who acts and the Son who himself is the “understanding.”  Christ, then, as God, has the Holy Spirit as the movement itself of love in His heart.  And Christ, also, as a man, has the Holy Spirit as the source of grace by which he moves with love, since after his baptism He “was filled with the Holy Spirit” (Lk 4:1) and also since He “offered himself to God through the Holy Spirit” (Hebrews 9:14, italics added).  So the Sacred Heart is crowned with a wreath of flames, which represents the Holy Spirit acting with and through Christ, the same Spirit aching to crown us with fire and fill us with the love of Jesus.

Prior to the incarnation, this was the whole story, but then “the word became flesh” (Jn 1:14) and everything changed.  Christ has a human heart, with human love.  What is human love but word made flesh, faith meeting works, a heart wreathed in thorns?  And do we suppose the Lord endured such things without the Holy Spirit?  Rather we believe that the sacred heart, the fleshly heart of Christ filled with the Holy Spirit, ] represents the wisdom of God moving by the Holy Spirit with true acts of love that are manifest in the physical person of Jesus.  

And somehow the eternal wisdom of God, weighing the evils of this finite world against the infinite good stored for us in heaven, considered it right for the Word of God, already humbled to become man, to endure crucifixion.  This is the necessary consequence— following not from our great valor or from some theological calculus, but from the infinite love of Christ for us.  It is His inestimable love for us that makes us worthy and transcends human understanding; it’s for this reason that the Sacred Heart is wrapped in thorns and topped with a cross.

If the Sacred Heart is aflame with the Holy Spirit, and we are offered the same gift of love, how could we go without it? If the eternal Word in all his glory assumed flesh and made this love manifest in his actions, and we are called to the same work, how could we do anything less?  And if the precious love of God would so move Him to put our eternal life before his earthly one so that he would die for our sake, and only we are capable of allowing His work to be complete in us, then how could we love the same?  So let us imitate the Sacred Heart of Christ, until our hearts look like His.


My name is Luke Malanga and I’m a rising second year studying biomedical engineering.  I’m originally from Spotsylvania Virginia (no, not NOVA) and in my free time I like to play rugby and pretend to think deep thoughts with the UVA Thomistic Institute chapter.  Fun fact about me, on the weekend I’m writing this my 80-year-old grandpa (a deacon and retired NYC cop and Army soldier) went skydiving.