The Sacred Heart of Jesus should not only glow with the divine love, but kindle with that same influence all that comes within its reach? The fire he came to send on the earth was none other than the fire of love which penetrated and informed his own sacred humanity.

I am come to cast fire on the earth; and what will I but that it be kindled? (Luke 12:49)

Fire! What sound is there more terrifying to human ears? Not that, I suppose, there is a very large number of deaths from fire every year; not that, in London at any rate, the ravages caused by fire are often widespread or important. But there is, even in the smallest conflagration, an element of uncertainty, a threat of unlimited danger, which makes the hearts of the boldest stop for a moment. You see the flames suddenly leap up as they catch a window-frame or a curtain, and imagination allows you to see that on a large scale. You realize that with every moment of its duration the flames grow terribly in volume; fire breeds fire, communicates itself to all that stands in its way—everything yields before it, and in yielding becomes a traitor, deserts to the enemy, helps to spread the danger and increase the panic.…

Fire—I suppose that is at the root of our fear of it—is insatiable; food only increases its appetite; the more it has devoured, the more hungrily it ravens. It is not surprising, then, that it serves human language with a hundred metaphors, stands for type of any violent passion or any sudden agitation which threatens peace of mind in the society or the individual. In the old Greek story, Hecuba the Queen of Troy dreamt that she had given birth to a firebrand; and the son who was born to her at that time was the reckless Paris, who through his treachery and his lawless love brought war on his country and destruction upon his native city. One man could be pointed out as the source of that universal ruin, just as one match or one spark may be pointed out as the insignificant cause that set a whole factory or a whole warehouse ablaze, just as the smouldering embers of a camp fire may set the forest for miles around roaring in sheets of flame. No wonder the legend called Paris a firebrand.

Now, when the Holy Spirit overshadowed our blessed Lady, and she became the virgin Mother of Incarnate God, she too had brought a fire into the world. “I am come to cast fire on the earth,” our Lord says, “and what will I but that it be kindled?” “Beware,” said Moses to the people of Israel in his last charge to them, “beware lest thou ever forget the covenant of the Lord thy God which he hath made with thee…because the Lord thy God is a consuming fire, a jealous God” (Deut. 4:23, 24). A jealous God—he claims everything from his creatures, will not be content that they should rest and find their satisfaction in anything less than himself. A consuming fire—so tyrannous is his love for us whom his own hands have made that when he reveals himself, all that is base in us and all that is unworthy in us—and how much is there in us which is not base and unworthy?—must needs shrink and shrivel away before his presence. “Which of you can dwell with devouring fire?” asks Isaias. “Which of you shall dwell with everlasting burnings?” (Isa. 23:14). Man in the presence of his Maker is as stubble ready to be burnt up by the fire—that is the terrified conviction of the Hebrew prophets.

And with the Incarnation, what happened? That consuming fire of Godhead, before the breath of which, we had thought, everything that is human must shrivel and melt away, was brought into the most close and intimate union conceivable with a human nature. But that human nature was endowed with every perfection of which human nature is capable; there was no base dross in it to be purged away even by the searching flame of a divine presence; it was true metal all through. What wonder, then, that the human heart of Jesus of Nazareth, like metal that is perfectly tempered and needs no more refining, should have become as it were a glowing mass, white-hot with the influence of divine love? And what wonder, if a white-hot mass of metal scorches and kindles all around it no less than flame itself, that the Sacred Heart of Jesus should not only glow with the divine love, but kindle with that same influence all that comes within its reach? The fire he came to send on the earth was none other than the fire of love which penetrated and informed his own sacred humanity.…

Many waters cannot quench love—those impious hands that would have put an end to our Lord’s influence by persecuting him to the death achieved, instead, the very opposite—the flames of his love rose all the higher for their efforts to combat it.

My faultless breast the furnace is,

The fuel, wounding thorns,

Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke,

The ashes, shames and scorns;

The fuel Justice layeth on,

And Mercy blows the coals,

The metal in this furnace wrought

Are men’s defiled souls.

The Sacred Heart of Jesus, in that hour of its human tragedy, began to draw all hearts towards itself, to melt and transfuse them with its own ardour of charity.

So he died and rose and ascended into heaven; it might have looked, to the outward view, as if it were all over; the Jews his enemies might congratulate themselves, flatter themselves with the fancy that they had extinguished the conflagration which menaced the security of their pride. But no, the fire was only smouldering; it had not died out. It smouldered still in a few human hearts—not more, perhaps, than a hundred and twenty, this glow of love which they had caught from their close intimacy with the Master who had left them. It only needed a wind to fan those embers into life. And with the day of Pentecost the Holy Ghost came down, a rushing mighty wind, and tongues of visible fire lighted upon their heads as they sat in the upper room, the symbol of that inward fire which his visitation fanned into pure flame. “The just shall shine,” says the Book of Wisdom, “and shall run to and fro like sparks among the stubble” (Wis. 3:7). So the flame that was kindled in the upper room swept through Jerusalem—three thousand souls that day, five thousand souls the next, brought under the influence of the holocaust of love which had been offered for them on Calvary. They continued daily, this multitude of believers, in the breaking of bread; the heart of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist fed the flame within them and made them in their turn missionaries for the faith they had received. The fire was spreading, and the malice of the Jews looked on helplessly, unable to quench the infectious fervour that had set their city ablaze.

What need to follow the history of that conflagration further? Still, all down the centuries, the love that burns in the Sacred Heart has found in men’s hearts fresh fuel to catch its flame. Again and again, through the centuries, men have prophesied that the Christian faith was doomed: “the superstition,” they say to one another, “cannot last much longer; the blaze has lasted so many centuries; in time it must burn itself out.” They do not understand that though the flame of charity in our imperfect human souls seems here to mount, there to die down as the Spirit, blowing where he will, fans it or lets it smoulder, the heart of the blaze is something that glows white-hot with a heat which never varies and can never spend itself. The heart of all this conflagration in the world which we call the Christian religion is the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ, still white-hot with the interpenetrating glow which the Godhead communicates to it, inextinguishable and indefectible as the Being of God himself. Let them try to quench the flames, they will rise higher; let them wait to see the end of the conflagration, and it will burst out with fresh vigour where they least expected it. Our Lord Jesus Christ came to cast a fire on the earth; and what was his will but that it should be kindled? And what is his will, no human effort can gainsay.

As for us Christians, we will draw near to it. Oh, we are very cautious about it, some of us; we only just want to warm ourselves a little, we don’t want to get scorched with the flames. Or are we really Christians, when we calculate like that? Are we really Christians, when we think that the fire of divine love which beats in the Sacred Heart can destroy anything in us, except that base dross in our natures, that worldliness, that selfishness, that pride of the human spirit, which as Christians we should want to see purged away? It was not so that the saints understood the invitation of the Sacred Heart; they would not come near it hesitatingly and with calculation, as if to warm their hands at it. Rather, they would plunge themselves into that abyss of fire, to be refined of all that was unworthy, to be melted and moulded according to God’s plan, to become, themselves, glowing reflections of its heat to kindle the cold hearts of their fellow men.

Let us think what it is we want this divine flame of the Sacred Heart to do for us when we draw near to it, as we do draw near to it every time we receive our Lord in the Holy Eucharist. We want, as I say, to be purged, to be refined. “I offer to thee, Lord,” says the Imitation of Christ, “all the sins and offences which I have ever committed since the day when I could first sin even to this hour, that thou wouldest burn and consume them with the fire of thy charity.” And the burning away of our sins, remember, is not a process quite external to ourselves, although the sins lie in the past and have already been forgiven by the sacrament of penance. Their influence lives on in our lives, more, probably, than we know; the affection we still retain for them and for the occasions of them is still a part of our character; a part of our character, it may be, which we rather admire, or other people admire in us. But it is these stains of our sins that we must offer courageously to be burned and seared away by the white-hot charity of the Sacred Heart, if we are really in earnest about it. Remember, we have purgatory to look forward to, and it is these stains of our earthly conversation which will then have to be refined away by the fire that burns from without, if we have not already consumed them through the influence of the divine fire that burns within.

That, then, is the first effect we are to pray for, when we draw near this furnace of love, the heart of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist—that the dross of our sinfulness may be purged away. And the next is that we ourselves may grow hot, red-hot, white-hot, from that contact. You see, it is the nature of this mysterious thing we call fire to reproduce itself; the effect of a live coal on a dead coal is to make it like itself, red-hot. So it is with the divine love; we want to be so transformed with it that we shall become in some measure like Jesus Christ. It would be true to say, of course, that in proportion as our hearts are more enflamed with the love of God we become more like God. But, you see, that tells us so little. We can form only such distant ideas, abstract, negative sort of ideas, about what God is like, that it would be a hopeless model to set before ourselves if we said, “I want to be like God.” But to say, “I want to be like Jesus Christ”—that is a very different matter. Jesus Christ has lived as Man on earth, and the record of his gracious sayings and doings is still left with us. To say, “Make our hearts like thy most Sacred Heart,” does convey a definite idea to our minds, because we can read in the holy gospels how that most Sacred Heart was wrung with the wilfulness and the injustice and the ingratitude of men, and still loved them and prayed for their pardon. That then is the second effect we pray for when we draw near the Sacred Heart, that our hearts may become like it, as flame is kindled from flame.

And the third effect we shall pray for is that we, too, in our turn, may be able to set light to other hearts, even colder than ours, as the glow of the divine flame diffuses itself more and more through our own. In nature, those substances which conduct heat not only absorb it into themselves but pass it on to their surroundings. And so it is with the love of God. Nobody, says St Augustine, can kindle others until he is himself ablaze. It’s true, of course, that in the Providence of God the good which is done by a man or by a mission, the amount of conversation achieved, is out of all proportion to what we should have expected. God is not tied down by his human instruments. But for all that, if we want to bring others to the faith, if we want to reclaim others from lives of sin, if we want to bring up our children in the love of God, then the first thing is to burn red-hot with the love of God ourselves. And then, if it be his will, we shall be able to pass the conflagration on.

May our Lord Jesus Christ kindle and evermore keep alive in our hearts the flame of charity which his most Sacred Heart has sent upon the earth.

This essay is taken from Pastoral Sermons. Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.

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The featured image, uploaded by Lloydbaltazar, is “Sacred Heart of Jesus” (1767), by Pompeo Batoni. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.