What Does “Heart” Mean?

The Sacred Heart is a theological claim about where reality is anchored. This Heart of Jesus is where God’s love for humanity takes on flesh, takes on feeling, takes on a wound.

In our culture, the heart tends to mean emotions — sentiment, feeling, romance. In the biblical world it meant far more. In biblical language, ‘heart’ indicates the centre of the person where his sentiments and intentions dwell. The heart, in Scripture, is the whole inner life of a person — their will, their intellect, their deepest desires, their capacity for love and for God.

To speak of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, then, is to speak of the interior life of God made man. It is to enter into the very consciousness of Christ — to encounter not merely what He did, but who He is and how He loves. 

The Heart That Was Wounded

The Sacred Heart is always shown wounded — and that wound is not incidental. It is the key to everything. Fr. Hugh Barbour, O.Praem., patristic theologian and Norbertine of St. Michael’s Abbey, has explained that the devotion does not begin with 17th-century France or with St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. It begins in John 19:34 — the moment when a soldier’s lance pierced the side of the crucified Christ, and blood and water flowed forth.

The early Church regarded this as a miraculous sign: blood does not flow from a dead body as though it were still pumping. The flowing of blood and water from the wound pointed beyond natural death to the living, divine power still present in Christ’s body — a power that the Fathers understood as the very origin of the sacraments. Blood and water: Eucharist and Baptism. The wound in His side gave access to His Heart. And from His Heart, the entire sacramental life of the Church was born. The Sacred Heart devotion talks about the very origins and source of all liturgical worship. To practice devotion to the Sacred Heart is to step more deeply into the liturgical and sacramental centre of Catholic life.

May the Heart of Jesus be loved!