The Valor of Christ’s Unshielded Sacred Heart
By Larry Chapp
June is the month the Church devotes to honoring the Sacred Heart of Jesus. And in my mind, when understood in its deep profundity, it is the most important of the Church’s various devotions. Therefore, what we need now is to go beyond the laced doily, parlor room domestication of this devotion that reduces it to a pious sentimentalism and to recover it in its true depth as the revelation of an infinite, living love that abides eternally, that cuts, provokes, and thereby atones by turning our hearts of stone into hearts of living, spiritual flesh.
The devotion to the Sacred Heart cuts to the core of the dilemma and dread which the human condition presents to us. The dilemma of a heart made for God but also crudded-over with the slime of sin, which is the source of the dread and misery of our lives. We seek to carve out of our sufferings some safe space of inner stability which we then defend by erecting around our hearts defensive shields of various kinds. We say, “Here is my shielded fortress of solitude and it is solely ‘mine’ and nobody, not even the god of my ‘religion,’ can touch it. It is mine, my only, my precious.”
These shields are constructions of the heart that we adhere to with idolatrous force as a non-negotiable, existential Maginot line of defense against our monism of meaninglessness. And within those shields is also the realm of our various bargainings with God wherein we seek to exchange our half-way measures and our head-nodding bourgeois gestures toward moral propriety for guarantees from God that we will be granted the nebulous and ill-defined thing called “salvation,” which for most people seems to be a mere cipher for a promise of some kind of paradise park after we die.
But Christ’s Sacred Heart stands in stark contrast to our shielded hearts. Indeed, it is our shielded hearts’ redemptive antithesis—it exposes our lies and reveals that our hearts were not made for a shielded safe zone of worldly palliatives but rather for the unshielded valor of a self-divesting charity that knows no limits and strikes no bargains. Christ’s Sacred Heart is an atoning heart, which means it is a heart oriented toward the other—in fact, toward all others—and its infinite, unshielded openness creates a new “safe space” for us that, paradoxically, beckons us to a kind of death. Specifically, it beckons us into his death. This safe space is unbrokered by the limiting valences of the principalities and powers whose hold on us through the fear of mortal death is now broken.
Thus are we called into the valor of Christ’s unshielded Sacred Heart. We too are to be priests of this regime of charity and of the intercessory power of our own sufferings, which can now be linked to his. This is the only true revolution the world has ever known. All other revolutions are mere reshufflings of the deck of the libido dominandi. Only Christ’s unshielded heart bypasses the circuitry of the world and rewires us to live without shields.
Few in the Church have meditated more deeply than Hans Urs von Balthasar upon these linkages between the Sacred Heart of Jesus, evil, suffering, and of the need for the valor of an unshielded heart. Balthasar traces the metaphysics of classical antiquity and, in a penetrating analysis, notes that the Greek tragedians, unlike their philosophical contemporaries, viewed man’s dignity as mysteriously related to the “glory” that emanates from the realm of the gods. Balthasar puts it as follows: “In tragedy, man acts against the background of the god and man only reveals himself, emerging into the light of his own truth, because of the appearance of the god, even in wrath and concealment.” And he then concludes:
“But … the situation in which this truth emerges is now that of suffering … which lays man bare in his vulnerability, forcibly exposing and humiliating him. Only a great and majestic human being is equal to this; he alone can bear such a burden, and only from him, when he is finally and necessarily broken apart, can there arise, like a fragrance, the pure essence of human kind, indeed, of being as such. What is unprecedented here is that the suffering is neither denied … nor is it shunned …, but rather the way of man to god and the revelation of the deep truth of existence passes directly through the most extreme form of suffering. That is the valor of the unshielded heart, which philosophy will lack, and which stands in a direct relation to Christ.” (The Glory of the Lord IV, p. 103)
In tragedy the existence of the gods is taken seriously and it is the final victory and glorification of the gods that forms the backdrop for the dramatic action that unfolds. Man’s true dignity, therefore, resides in accepting “fate,” even if it ultimately means suffering and death, for it is only in such acceptance that man too can participate in the glory of the divine realm and achieve a measure of calm serenity, even joy, as our sufferings are lifted up and bathed in the glory of the victory of the gods. Therein lies as well a kind of liberation as the valor of an unshielded heart approaches the gods with no bargaining or preconditions and allows itself to be broken open, revealing the soul’s true inner dignity as a liturgy of transformed suffering that also acts as the medium for the god’s epiphany.
What the Greeks lacked, of course, is the revelation of the glory of Christ. The Sacred Heart of Jesus is the most unshielded heart possible, and therefore after him no tragedy in a high register is any longer possible. Greek tragic figures such as Oedipus and Antigone really were guilty of something and thus their sufferings are ultimately the result of divine justice but without any hope of reparation or restoration. Their unshielded hearts, therefore, had valor as they accepted their fate with a dignified moral resolve, but in the end their fate, though epiphanic, is a tragic one.
And the inherent inscrutability of the world of the gods means that the question of man’s tragic fate is left hanging; is human tragedy a merely penultimate reality awaiting a future resolution or is it our ultimate destiny? Is this wound which bleeds into us without ceasing ever to end or are we destined to suffer the futility of an endlessly repeating nightmare forever? Is the machinery of divine justice like a set of automatic gears in which we will all be ground-up and pulverized or will there be some sort of heuristic dénouement to the whole affair that speaks of mercy? The tragedians do not say, because they cannot say, but the fact that the human characters show up at all speaks to the importance of their free choices in the unfolding drama—a moral dimension—that transcends mere fate.
But in Christ there is no such ambiguity, no tragic “fate” that is the result of his sins, and certainly no hint of a divine justice that is without mercy or reparative grace. Christ’s human soul is uniquely “unshielded” insofar as it is utterly open to both his Father’s will (mission) and to those who have been entrusted to him (all of humanity). His entire existence can be defined as “pro nobis,” a “man for others,” and whose mission is precisely to be completely broken open in order to bear the sins of the world through a mysterious “exchange,” wherein he takes into his unshielded soul without any filtrations the full existential weight and consequences for our sins. What can this mean? Who can fathom its mysterious depths? St. Paul says that Christ “became” sin for our sakes, which underscores the substitutionary nature of this exchange and, therefore, its reparative atonement (see 2 Cor. 5:21).
But how does it atone? Is it because Christ has taken on the punishments due to sin in order to appease an “offended” God who will not forgive his wayward creatures until he gets his pound of flesh? How could Christ’s tortured and murderous death “please” God? Sin does indeed require some form of retributive punishment, but all too often the popular take on the atonement is vulgar and involves a monstrous portrayal of God as a kind of sky sadist.
A better view of the atonement is rooted in the unchanging and unconditional love of the God of the Covenant. There is no single view of the atonement that can adequately pin-down in a totalizing scheme the full depths of its mystery. Nevertheless, what is revealed as the central motif of all of Scripture is that God is love. Love can and must also involve justice, of course, otherwise it would not be a true love; but most certainly at the very least such a view of God precludes the sky sadist described above.
Therefore, a full and proper view of the atonement must be rooted in the theological fact that God is love. And it is more in line with this truth to view the atonement as an exchange wherein, in a mysterious mystical act, Christ takes into his unshielded heart the full toxicity and poison that is sin and suffers it through to the end. And if the ultimate consequence of all sin is distance from God, then Christ suffers that distance, that dereliction, and that crushing alienation in the dark night of the experience of God’s absence. And yet, despite it all, Christ continues to love even from the depths of darkness and offers to the Father on our behalf a perfect act of contrition. In other words, our “no” to God which our sins both represent and instantiate, is transformed into a definitive “yes.” We too must appropriate that “yes” and make it our own—our salvation being anything but automatic—but we are now relieved of the anxiety that our faith can never be good enough to merit the Father’s forgiveness.
Heaven and Hell are, therefore, Christological states of being, both of which reside within the theandric “decision” contained within that substitutionary exchange. But they are not symmetrical since Christ’s corporate action pro nobis directly implies the priority of the regime of grace and salvation over that of perdition.
Being saved means something far deeper and far more existentially gripping than the magical view of salvation that so many seem to assume. Those who are saved are now called to enter into Christ’s body, thereby putting on the “new man.” But what does that mean? What is this “new man?” It is the pattern of Christ’s own humanity, including his atoning death. Christians therefore are called to emulate his Sacred Heart and to transform our own souls into unshielded hearts, allowing ourselves to be broken open in order to also suffer for the sins of the world. Ours is a substitutionary vocation wherein our entire life becomes a liturgy of intercession for “others.”
Such intercession, far from being a pietistical puddle of saccharine syrup, is in reality the very warp and woof of our vocation as priests. A priest is an intermediary who prays and intercedes on behalf of the people. And the priesthood of all the baptized means that we are a “people set apart” for the express purpose of interceding for others. Therefore, this pattern of substitutionary intercession, which includes both prayer and acts of charity, is not an ancillary element of our salvation but rather is its very essence.
There is a reason why St. Therese of Lisieux, a cloistered nun, is the patron saint of missionaries. Her quiet life of intercession, her “little way,” is nothing short of the very meaning of the Gospel—which is why she is also a Doctor of the Church. Furthermore, the deepest purpose behind “converting those others” is so that they too can become part of this corporate body of intercessors, thus elevating their own suffering (which may have seemed existentially meaningless to them before their conversion) into the “glory” of Christ’s paschal action.
But as I said above, this is a gut-punch because it means unshielding our hearts in a raw and radical conversion to a form of spiritual empathy that requires us to rid ourselves of any notion of entitlement with the endless demands for our own “rights” that entitlement brings. We are to be a divested people, poured out, and profligate in our forgiveness. And this is especially true when we ourselves endure sufferings caused by injustices committed against us. The commandment to love and mercy found in the Sermon on the Mount is not so much a prescription for an earthly social order as it is an eschatological summons to lessen the full range of sin’s regime. For when we forgive those who harm us, we lessen the effect of those sins, thus reducing the offender’s guilt. This means that forgiveness is much more than a cheap therapeutic of emotions but is also a demand of charity. There can be no true Christian existence without it, and we cannot be “saved” if we are parsimonious in its application.
This is why a Church that is overly fixated on penultimate things becomes, through an inexorable spiritual logic, a Church of worldly compromises. Because the penultimate, when it becomes a substitute for the ultimate, inevitably devolves into a drab and suffocating ordo of utilitarian casuistries. As the Gaelic language would put it, there are now shields “galore.” And a Church of shields, both figural and literal, is not a Church in spiritual and pastoral solidarity with the primary Christological act of substitutionary atonement.
Therefore, a devotion to Christ’s unshielded Sacred Heart has deep connotations for the Church as a whole as well. Can we say that a Church bureaucracy larded with lawyers on retainer in order to manage the blizzard of lawsuits created by secrets and lies is a Church with an unshielded heart? A Church grown fat with mammon and comfortable with the compromises mammon demands is certainly not the Church of substitutionary intercession, but is rather a Church of possessors and owners, overly concerned with protecting its unfettered “right” to maintain its fortress of sacramental solitude. Not without reason did Jesus warn us that we cannot serve both God and mammon. Because we cannot offer our unshielded hearts up as a sacrifice for the cankerous wound that afflicts the world all the while clinging, like the old lady in Hell in Dostoevsky’s parable, to the rotted onion of our merely holographic charity.
What we need now, as Dorothy Day noted decades ago, is a true revolution of the heart, and not more synods on synods and silly superficial papal lectures on avoiding “backwardism.” We need the unshielded Sacred Heart of Christ as our one and only deep reality.
Dr. Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology who taught for twenty years at DeSales University. He now owns and manages, with his wife, the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania. He can be visited online at Gaudium et Spes 22.