Month of the Sacred Heart: Heart of Jesus, Loaded Down with Oppression

“Behold this heart that has so loved men, and in return I receive from most only ingratitude with their irreverence and sacrileges, with their coldness and contempt for Me in this sacrament of love.” 

Jesus no longer suffers; He can no longer suffer; but the outrage from men is no less real: they do everything that could be done to make Him suffer if He was not out of their reach because of His glorious condition.

But there is more: all of these outrages resounded one day in His heart; He suffered from them when He could still suffer here below.

In His Passion, He did not feel only the insults of the Jews and Romans; He did not suffer only from the ingratitude of His fellow citizens and the betrayal of His friends. The future and the past were included in His sorrows; they were concentrated in them.

 Jesus does not suffer at present, but He suffered from the present, and the faithful are right to depict Him as suffering, since He suffered from the offenses of the present. Not to mention that we are always allowed to travel back in time to commiserate with Jesus, the future of the past being the present of today. Could the exactness of the expression be corrected without failing to express the profound truth of the thing and the impression it should cause?

In any case, St. Margaret Mary saw the Sacred Heart crowned with thorns and with a cross above it; and she explained very well how she saw this as the sign of a great reality:

It was surrounded by a crown of thorns signifying the wounds our sins inflicted upon Him: and above it was a cross signifying that as soon as the Sacred Heart was formed, the cross was planted in it.

 J.V. Bainvel, Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Beauschene, 1921, p. 134-135.