Why would God write on your heart?

God writing on our heart! It’s a powerful image even in this age of amazing cardiothoracic development. God conveys this promise through his prophet Jeremiah (31: 31-34) in the 5^th Sunday of Lent’s first Reading. Decades ago teenagers decorated tree trunks with messages of love. Hopefully, today’s youngsters are more ‘green-minded’.

The heart is our repository for guarding what we hold most dear. God’s desire to inscribe his love on our heart tells us how deeply he loves us. It also tells of the depth of his desire for our love. Thus, heart ‘speaks’ unto heart. God speaks with clarity, compassion and commitment. We mumble and falter and yet He loves us.

God first gave his Commandments to Moses on tablets of stone. Those tablets Moses smashed when, after descending the mountain, he found his people had apostatized and had broken faith with God – “I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers the day I took them by the hand to lead them forth from the land of Egypt; for they broke my covenant, and I had to show myself their master, says the Lord.”

The periodic emergence of the people’s endemic unfaithfulness prolonged their Egyptian exile and their desert journey. Throughout, Jeremiah was God’s prophet of a hope in which to believe and to find strength. God’s tenderness, revealed through Jeremiah, was to reassure his people that reconciliation would bring restoration – “ … this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people. All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the Lord, for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more.”

God’s love, unlike ours, is consistent. Humanity’s self-inflicted disability (the disobedience that caused our exile from God) is detrimental to our overall capacities including our capacity to love. God chose to become man, in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth, so that we should see in one like ourselves, how we are called to love God, despite our disability. In this Sunday’s Second Reading (Hebrews 5: 7-9) the author points out Jesus’ path to obedience through suffering. The implication for us is clear, life on earth is a full-time pilgrimage. Excursions to Lourdes, Fatima and the Holy Land are supplementary to not replacements for our daily commitment.

God writes on our heart to help us in our weariness to recall that he has already walked ahead and now, through his Holy Spirit, walks alongside as our companion on the way. Like Jesus we will encounter periods of bewilderment of indeterminate length, of fatigue that seems to halt us in our tracks and of darkness that deprives us a sense of God’s nearness.

In this Sunday’s Gospel (John12: 20-33) Jesus gives us the teaching of the need for the wheat grain to fall to the ground and die if there is to be a harvest. He then adds poignantly –
“I am troubled now. Yet what should I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it and will glorify it again.”

In his message for Lent 2015, Pope Francis writes:
‘God does not ask of us anything that he himself has not first given us. “We love because he first has loved us’. He is not aloof from us. Each one of us has a place in his heart. He knows us by name, he cares for us and he seeks us out whenever we turn away from him. He is interested in each of us; his love does not allow him to be indifferent to what happens to us. Usually, when we are healthy and comfortable, we forget about others (something God the Father never does): we are unconcerned with their problems, their sufferings and the injustices they endure. Our heart grows cold. As long as I am relatively healthy and comfortable, I do not think about those less well off. Today, this selfish attitude of indifference has taken on global proportions, to the extent that we can speak of a globalisation of indifference. It is a problem which we, as Christians, need to confront.’
And
‘Indifference to our neighbour and to God also represents a real temptation for us Christians. Each year during Lent we need to hear once more the voice of the prophets who cry out and trouble our conscience.’

And
‘Dear brothers and sisters, how greatly I desire that all those places where the Church is present, especially our parishes and our communities, may become islands of mercy in the midst of the sea of indifference!’

If we allow others to see what Christ has written in our heart then it may awaken in them also a desire for closeness with him.