The Catholic Defender: The Promises of the Sacred Heart of Jesus to St. Margaret Mary Promise 3

(3) I will comfort them in all their afflictions. I just love this picture, notice the two boys how they are looking at the Eucharist and the Monstrance. Don't you know that Our Lord is smiling down on them! This is a picture that captures in time and space something that speaks volumes.

The parents are truly blessed and I am thankful to have been blessed to see this. No matter what this family have to contend with, the Lord is blessing them. Jesus gives this promise that He "will comfort them in all their afflictions."

Joshua 24:15 states, "If it is displeasing to you to serve the LORD, choose today whom you will serve, the gods your ancestors served beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose country you are dwelling. As for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.” Today, it is not much different than it was back in Joshua's time. Like Joshua, we need to make the decision to serve the Lord.

Psalms 34:19 states, "The LORD is close to the brokenhearted, saves those whose spirit is crushed." The word "affliction" appears at least 76 times in the Bible. The Lord is offering hope to the weary, the brokenhearted, those in need of His help. The Sacred Heart devotion helps us see that Our God is the God of compassion.

James 5:11 states, "Indeed we call blessed those who have persevered. You have heard of the perseverance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, because “the Lord is compassionate and merciful." Jesus is compassionate and merciful and He gives us so many opportunities for His Grace. This is the characteristic of God.

The Sacred Heart devotion meditates on the Lord's interior life. Within the Heart of Jesus there is His Divine Love which is beyond all understanding. His Heart burns with love for all men including those who crucified Him. His human will is so in line with His Divine will. His human will accepted the cross, His Divine will accepted the Father's call.

How sad it is when we place ourselves in terrible situations that entrap you away from the Lord's mercy. Today, while meeting a family in a parking lot at a grocery store, I entered into a conversation with them. After finding out that the Mother was a fallen Catholic, I began to share to her the importance of her Catholic faith. Just as I was reaching her, the husband cut off the discussion because he wanted to get her away from the situation. As they walked off I could not help feeling how entrapped she felt. It was like the Pied Piper was leading her away never to be heard from again. Please pray for her.

Pope Pius XII wrote his encyclical, Haurietis Aquas (Devotion To The Sacred Heart) writing the following:

54. ...the Heart of the Incarnate Word is deservedly and rightly considered the chief sign and symbol of that threefold love with which the divine Redeemer unceasingly loves His eternal Father and all mankind.

55. It is a symbol of that divine love which He shares with the Father and the Holy Spirit but which He, the Word made flesh, alone manifests through a weak and perishable body, since “in Him dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily.”

56. It is, besides, the symbol of that burning love which, infused into His soul, enriches the human will of Christ and enlightens and governs its acts by the most perfect knowledge derived both from the beatific vision and that which is directly infused.

57. And finally – and this in a more natural and direct way – it is the symbol also of sensible love, since the body of Jesus Christ, formed by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, possesses full powers of feelings and perception, in fact, more so than any other human body.

58. Since, therefore, Sacred Scripture and the official teaching of the Catholic faith instruct us that all things find their complete harmony and order in the most holy soul of Jesus Christ and that He has manifestly directed His threefold love for the securing of our redemption, it unquestionably follows that we can contemplate and honor the Heart of the divine Redeemer as a symbolic image of His love and a witness of our redemption and, at the same time, as a sort of mystical ladder by which we mount to the embrace of “God our Savior.”

59. Hence His words, actions, commands, miracles, and especially those works which manifest more clearly His love for us – such as the divine institution of the Eucharist, His most bitter sufferings and death, the loving gift of His holy Mother to us, the founding of the Church for us, and finally, the sending of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and upon us – all these, we say, ought to be looked upon as proofs of His threefold love.

60. Likewise we ought to meditate most lovingly on the beating of His Sacred Heart by which He seemed, as it were, to measure the time of His sojourn on earth until that final moment when, as the Evangelists testify, “crying out with a loud voice ‘It is finished’ and bowing His Head, He yielded up the ghost.” Then it was that His heart ceased to beat and His sensible love was interrupted until the time when, triumphing over death, He rose from the tomb.

61. But after His glorified body had been re-united to the soul of the divine Redeemer, conqueror of death, His most Sacred Heart never ceased, and never will cease, to beat with calm and imperturbable pulsations. Likewise, it will never cease to symbolize the threefold love with which He is bound to His heavenly Father and the entire human race, of which He has every claim to be the mystical Head.