The Integrity of God’s Love – Br. Lain Wilson

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The Sacred Heart of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Hosea 11:1, 3-4, 8c-9
Canticle 9
Ephesians 3:8-12, 14-19
John 19:31-37

In just a brief perusal of the headlines, we can quickly come to feel like integrity is in short supply. It’s hard to know who to trust. People we thought we knew well for decades may suddenly reveal an inner darkness. Narratives may change suddenly, inducing whiplash. Outright dishonesty and obfuscation may set us adrift, uncertain of our bearings. Where do we stand, when everything around us can feel mutable, negotiable?

Our feast today—the sacred heart of Jesus—reveals something fundamental about Jesus’s integrity, something true about the faithfulness and reliability of Jesus, of his, of God’s, love for us. And it is an invitation to us to let our own hearts be transformed, to find our own integrity in integrity of Jesus’s heart.

British philosopher John Cottingham notes the link between integrity and self-knowledge: “We cannot act with integrity until we know who we are.”[1] In life, Jesus knew himself to be sent by the Father as a revelation of God’s love in and for the world. In our Gospel lesson this evening, detailing the immediate aftermath of Jesus’s death, Jesus’s own outpouring of that love on the cross finds almost sacramental expression in the pouring forth of blood and water from a spear wound (Jn 19:34). Water and blood: the very means of our own initiation into the new life and abiding with Christ, in baptism and the eucharist, and a continued revelation, even in death, of who Jesus was and knew himself to be. I think it is equally significant that this same spear wound would be, for Thomas, a point of recognition, transformation, and conversion after the Resurrection (Jn 20:27-28). The wound to his flesh, to his very heart, reveals in both episodes how Jesus extends an invitation to be loved, to be welcomed, to be known.

This self-giving love reveals the very integrity of the God who is Love. It reveals the God of Hosea, who turns from fierce anger and wrath and “led them with cords of kindness, with bands of love,” who was “to them like those who life infants to their cheeks,” who “bent down to them and fed them” (Hos 11:4, 8-9). It reveals the God of Isaiah, who persists in loving us, who is eternally faithful and trustworthy: “Surely, it is God who saves me; I will trust in him and not be afraid” (Canticle 9). It reveals the God who sent the only Son into a world, and a people, that God loved so much. It reveals the love of the Holy One who is in our very midst, in our very hearts.

The self-giving love of God, which we celebrate today, allows us to know fundamentally who we are: God’s beloved children. But integrity is not just about self-knowledge—that is, understood simply as the quest for autonomy or authenticity—but rather about our buying into something beyond ourselves. “Becoming what I am meant to be,” Cottingham goes on, “requires me, whether I like it or not, to bring my life into line with true and enduring objective values that I did not create, and which I cannot alter.”[2]

Even more than helping us to know who we are, then, the integrity of God’s love for us is that true, enduring objective value that provides us a reference point, a place of stability. “I pray that . . . Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith,” the writer to the church at Ephesus notes, “as you are being rooted and grounded in love,” that you may “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (Eph 3:16-17, 19). The love of God, very simply, gives our lives shape and meaning, and equips us to live them out in a world that God loves, but a world that persists in turning away from that love.

So what are we, the beloved of God, rooted and grounded in God’s love, to do in this resistant world?

I think we can do no better than do as Isaiah enjoins us: “Make [God’s] deeds known. . . . Sing the praises of the Lord. . . . Cry aloud . . . ring out your joy” (Canticle 9). With our prayer and voices, our bodies and intellects, our reason and imagination, our acting and our resting . . . with all that we are, with all that makes us who we are, in the integrity of our own beloved and loving lives, we can do no better than testify to the integrity of God’s love—ever-faithful, ever-offered—present in our very midst, in our very hearts.

Amen.

[1] J. Cottingham, “Integrity and Fragmentation,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 27.1 (2010): 8.

[2] Ibid., 13.