“Create a clean heart in me, O God,”1 the Psalmist prays. But how does that happen. By loving the poor, forgiving, sacrificing…. loving purely, without any thought of what’s in it for us…those are surely ways to a clean heart. By going to confession. That works. But none of these are the surest way by which God makes our hearts clean.
The surest way to a clean heart is hinted at in the Book of Revelation when we read that the Saints have washed their robes in the Blood of the Lamb. Robes that become sparkling white when washed in the Blood of the Lamb. The Blood of the Lamb. The Blood of Jesus.
And where does Jesus’s blood flow from? It flowed from the heart that beat within his very human chest. A Sacred Heart, which sometimes broke.
The Gospels tell us of two times the Lord’s heart broke when he went to visit his friends in Bethany. You rememeber the famous times, when, a few weeks before today’s Gospel, Jesus witnesses the dead body of his friend Lazarus. He trembled, the Gospels tell us. The Lord trembled, and then he wept. Not sniffled. Not cried, But wept. For weeping is a sign of a broken heart.
And in today’s Gospel, back at Lazarus’ house, the Lord’s heart breaks again, as he contemplates the suffering and death he is about to endure.
”I am troubled.” he tells his disciples in a remarkable admission. And what troubles him is the suffering he knows he will soon endure. The scourging, the nails and the excruciating death. And, perhaps even worse, the rejection, the condemnation and the execution of their wrath.
“What should I say?” he blurts out, giving us a window into the storm of agony which inflicts his heart. “What should I say?” Father, save me from this hour?' But it was for this very purpose that I came to this hour.”
Jesus’ heart is negotiating with itself, the way human hearts do. This or that? Saint Paul describes what’s going on:
"In the days when Christ Jesus was in the flesh, he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered."
And, of course, in the end Jesus chooses obedient love, faithful love: “Father, glorify your name.” And he opens his arms on the Cross. He wills to become the stone rejected by the builders, the suffering servant and the grain of wheat, crushed and buried for love of us and the glory of God’s name.
✴︎
This past week we celebrated the feast of the Great Saint Patrick. Not the Patrick of shamrocks or witty cards, but the Patrick of deep and struggling faith.
In his Confessions he writes about one of the most important turning points of his life. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Having escaped his enslavement to the Irish, he has returned home, where his family begs him to stay. But then he has a vision of a letter being read to him by an Irish saint, saying: “We ask you, holy boy, to come back and walk among us.”
Patrick tells us that the vision cut him to the heart. For he was torn between answering God’s call to convert the Irish (a life which promised frustration, suffering and exhaustion), or living a nice comfortable life back home with his family. So he prayed. And this is how he described it:
“deep within me…I heard this: He who has laid down his own life for you is speaking in you. And I was thus awakened rejoicing greatly. And again, I saw him Praying within me,”
Who did he see praying within him? “He who had laid down his life for you,” the Lord was praying within him. He goes on:
“and I looked…way down deep inside my body…and there he was praying earnestly within me with groans…”2
As Patrick was agonizing, struggling to find the strength to be faithful, he was not alone. But rather deep within his heard, Christ was praying alongside him. The one whose heart was troubled was right there groaning along with Patrick…the one who knew temptation and fear and dread, was as close to Patrick in his agony as he had ever been, with (as Patrick wrote) “unspeakable groans which could not be expressed in words.”
And you know just what Patrick was talking about.
✴︎
Think back to the most desperate moment in your life. The time you were convinced you did not have the strength to do the right thing. The Cross was too heavy, the fear was too great and you knelt there bleeding from the eyes with a broken heart.
Maybe it was the day you were betrayed, or you had to bury the one so cruelly taken from you. Maybe it was when everyone else believed the lie about you and scoffed and whispered behind your back. Maybe it was when they told it was malignant and terminal and all that stood between you and the grave was suffering. Maybe it was…
And there you knelt, like Patrick, with a knife in your heart. And it hurt like nothing else had ever hurt before.
But at that moment, whether it was yesterday, tomorrow or even today…like Patrick, you were not alone. For the one who wept blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, knew what it meant to have a troubled heart, to doubt, to tremble from the inside out in fear…
And he is the faithful God of infinite love, the Son obedient unto death out of love for us, the Lord who walks his Passion with us when we are too little or too weak or too poor or in too much pain. He walks there beside us and he strengthens us, for he is never so close to us as in his Passion and Cross.
For here is the great mystery of our lives: that “suffering is the inner side of love…”3
So the next time your heart is broken and you weep the prayer of suffering, look to your side and you will see Christ there, kneeling beside you, joining your Passion to his own.
And remember the advice once offered to us by St. Francis de Sales:
“The everlasting God has, in his wisdom, foreseen from all eternity the cross he now presents to you as a gift from his inmost heart. He has gazed at with his all-knowing eyes…to see that it be not one inch too large, not one ounce too heavy for you.
He has blessed it…taken one last glance at you and your courage….and sent this cross to you from heaven — a special greeting from God just to you — a gift of his all-merciful love.”
For that’s how God creates a clean heart.
_____________
1 - Psalm 51: 12a.
2 - Confessio, part II, nos. 125 and 140, in Patrick: The Pilgrim Apostle of Ireland, by Maíre B. de Paor (Regan Books, 1998).
3 - Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to Peter Seewald.
