A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. When, Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on the mountainside. After he had sat down, his disciples came and gathered around him, and Jesus began to teach them. How blessed are the poor in spirit, he said. The reign of god is theirs.
Blessed too are the sorrowing. They shall be consoled. Blessed are the lowly, they shall inherit the land. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for holiness, they shall have their fill. Blessed are they who show mercy.
Mercy shall be theirs. Blessed are the single hearted, for they shall see god. Blessed too, the peacemakers. They shall be called sons of god. Blessed are those persecuted for holiness' sake.
The reign of god is theirs. Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of slander against you because of me. Be glad and rejoice for your reward in heaven is great. They persecuted the prophets before you in the very same way. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord.
Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. We are going to have a sort of truncated novena. It will not add to the length of our mass, but it the prayers of the novena will substitute for the prayer of the faithful and the communion prayer at the end of mass. This is in preparation for the feast of the sacred heart of Jesus.
Now that feast was very slowly accepted in the church because it's a dangerous idea to talk about the heart of Christ as separated from the rest of his personality. However, at least in the western world, the heart has become a symbol of love. It's even on some of your automobile stickers on the bumpers. I love New York, so we have a heart for them now. So it's a commonplace in Western culture that we identify love with a heart.
We all know that the only thing a heart is is a muscle, kind of an important muscle too. But it is just a muscle. It reacts to emotions, we know that for sure. But anyway, the idea of this feast is there's no question about the the, worthwhileness of the feast. That is that we single out for very special attention the love of god through his son, Jesus Christ, for us.
We can forget this. I never will forget one day on the boat, I had a young man from a high school boy, and he turned to me and he said, look, why did God create us? Right out of the blue. Well, all I could answer, he loved us. There's you can't answer it any other way.
The point is that god has loved us long before we ever thought of loving him. And this feast is try is an attempt to call our attention, to focus our our awareness upon the love of God for us. Some years ago, you could use the hound of heaven of Francis Thompson. Thompson. Of course, it's not too well known now anymore.
But here is a marvelous story of god's pursuit of man. And so this feast of the sacred heart is special. It ought to be special. And I I and it's dangerous, I think, can eliminate for all practical purposes. And we can focus our attention that god loved us long before we ever thought of loving him, that he still loves us, that he loves us through thick and thin.
Now when I say that, I'm perfectly well aware of all the objections that come along and say, if god loves me, why does he treat me this way? That is a problem which is terrific. I've spent most of this past week on it. And I I'm not trying to to to deal with it in a very simplistic way. Certainly, many of the ways of god are very mysterious, to put it mildly.
And if you don't believe me, read the book of Job. There you have it. And so when we talk about god's love, we're not being blinded to a lot of the things that go into life, but we are saying that in spite of it all, through thick and thin, through the darkness of night, when as Newman said, I do not ask to see the distant shore, one step enough for me, we turn to the love of god through his son, Jesus Christ, for us. It is something in this world of so many changes we can truly rely upon. So now if you will take your pamphlet, we will begin.
This retakes the place of the prayer of the faithful.