A reading of the holy gospel according to Luke. Jesus addressed this parable to the pharisees and to the scribes. Who among you, he said, if he has a 100 sheep and loses one of them, does not leave the 99 in the wasteland and follow the lost one until he finds it. And when he finds it, he puts it on his shoulders in jubilation. And once arrived home, he invites friends and neighbors in and says to them, rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep.
I tell you, there will be likewise more joy in heaven over one repentant sinner than over 99 righteous people who have no need to repent. And this is the gospel of the lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. When this feast of the sacred heart was first being proposed, there was a considerable amount of objection to it and very valid objections. But in the long run, the objections took second place to other considerations.
And the other consideration was that we needed in some special way to bring into the forefront to focus all our attention, as it were, upon God's love for man and especially as expressed in his son Jesus Christ. To emphasize specifically the love of God expressed to our savior and redeemer, Jesus Christ. The objection, however, should not be overlooked. You see, it's very easy when you stress the sacred heart. Well, first of all, you're only picking out one organ of the human body.
That's dangerous. It used to be that you would see pictures of a heart alone. Well, that was extremely poor art, to put it mildly. But the heart, whether we like it or not, I'm not going to debate this, but whether we like it or not, down the centuries, the human heart for certain obvious reasons, physical reasons, physiological reasons, an obvious phenomenon. The human heart has been associated with the emotion or the passion that we call love.
So there's no getting away from that. You find it in early Greek literature, you find it in Roman literature, you find it all, at least in Western culture. So the heart symbolizes not an organ of the body but a very specific activity of the human being, probably in its highest form, because there are all levels of love, all kinds of love. As I say, the Oxford Dictionary has the unabridged has 13 columns of meanings for the English word love. So that there's certainly it's the understatement of the year to say that love has various levels.
But in all its levels, there's a symbolism here representing this very, or it can be, a very exalted and sublime emotion or passion of the human being. But love, you see, is not associated specifically with the emotions and the passions, which are physical things. We speak of the love of God. Have you ever thought what that may mean? Because with God, there is no such thing as a body.
There's no such thing as an emotion. There's no such thing as passion. So when you use the word love and apply it to God, have you ever thought, what am I talking about? What idea do I have? Think about it.
It could drive you up a tree sometimes. So this concept of love is a very profound and elusive and exalted one. But on the other hand, as identifying it with the heart, you can see can be can have its dangers. However, the idea of having a special feast dedicated in a special way to calling our attention to the love of God for his creature, man, was felt to be a need and that's how this feast was instituted. Now it's a very interesting phenomenon that today, if there's any if there's any problem about Jesus Christ, it's the humanizing of Christ.
You will find many people who will say, oh, I know I know Christ, and I admire him tremendously. Why do you do it? Why? Because he was one of the finest, if not the finest, of human beings who ever lived. It's almost commonplace to associate him with Socrates, with Buddha, even with Muhammad, God save us.
But anyway, this is a fact of life that in our world today. But but a little bit of history will be most enlightening Because in the early days of the church, you had a very strong movement called Gnosticism, very strong movement that swept all around from Northern Africa into Greece and back into Rome. And it was a movement of the elite, of the superior people, of those whose thoughts were lofty and solemn, who who could not harbor the idea that god almighty could associate himself with a body, with a human body. Because in their in their view, the body was something very low, but not only low, it was downright sinful. Out of the body came the evils of immorality that we call sin.
It was something to be despised. This is in the early days of the church. I'm not talking about post Cartesian days. I'm talking about the early days of the church from about 01/1950 on. This movement was extremely strong.
Just within the last few months there was a study made of what is called the Gnostic Gospels. Came out of New York. So even now the movement isn't It's a thrust which emphasizes spirituality, man's direct relationship with God through the Holy Spirit with no need of a church, And above all, as far as today's gospel and feast is concerned are concerned, you have here this downgrading of the body. And they could not there think of God in his sublime magnificence and purity, benevolence to be associated with this thing that a sixteenth century saint called a satchel of dung. And so they said that the body of Christ was simply a phenomenon.
It was just an illusion that it wasn't real. That's why you had these early councils, especially the council of Nicaea, which says that God truly became man and that Jesus Christ had a complete and entire human body. Let's not be afraid of that. Let's not be afraid of that. This concept of the human body is something degrading or degraded, something that is in itself sinful, something that in itself is unworthy of God.
This these remember, these ideas are still among us. Don't ever think that we're talking in terms of ancient history. So that today, however, as far as our lord is concerned, it's not his humanity that needs so much defense as it is his divinity. You hear even among the learned is whether Christ was conscious of his own divinity, whether he knew himself to be what he was. See, there's that there's that chipping away at God at Jesus Christ's untrue divinity, that he was God, and that God took upon himself human flesh, Got it from the blessed mother, our lady.
And that you can't make a mistake. Whenever you whenever you think of god in terms of man, that's called And we can't escape it entirely, but we ought to fight against it. But as far as Jesus Christ is concerned, we cannot exaggerate his humanity. He was everything any human being ever was except for sin. So there is no problem here as regards exaggerating Christ humanity as long as we cling solidly to the other aspect that he was truly the son of God.
And this is why, you see, Mary is and rightly is called the mother of God. Because in Jesus Christ, you have just was one person, one single person. Yet with these dual aspects or natures, if you want to call it that, of being completely God and holy and entirely man. This is if only we would think about this once in a while. And today, the church is doing what she can to lay before you as dramatically and spectacularly as she can with her ritual, with her liturgy, this great fact of how god loves you.
You hear so much today of people's being of finding themselves, as they say, isolated, alienated, alone, forlorn, deserted, abandoned, you name all these adjectives. How can that happen if a person has a firm conviction that before they ever could begin to love god, that god first loved them? If only we could get that into our heads, that before I ever can turn to God and say, God, I love you, he has already told you that he loves you. In the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit. Amen.