Reflection for the Fifth Sunday of Lent

I Just Need Your Heart
Fifth Sunday of Lent – Year B

Recently, a friend of mine shared with me the ending to a popular show we used to watch before I entered the monastery. The central romance – after being teased out across three seasons – had finally come to fruition and duly made all hearts melt... or it should have. I must admit, when my friend explained the final dramatic resolution to me, it left me a little cold.

The heroine – a thoroughly modern woman – had refused to marry the hero, and the hero – enlightened and brave, at least I expect we were meant to think him brave – avowed that he did not need her to marry him, but that he “just need[ed] her heart”. She, of course, confessed that she had given that to him a long time ago, but refused to be bound by the conventional ties that came with marriage.

To me, the exchange seemed to reveal that neither character really understood ‘the heart’ at all. If they had, they might have considered that to give ‘my heart’ but keep ‘my freedom’ was a somewhat nonsensical proposition. (Not only this, but they might also have concluded that such an arrangement was fired with the zest of a wet fish rather than a love for the ages.)

The heart, at least as it has long been understood in the classical and Western Philosophical and Theological traditions, is not simply the source of our current emotional output, but the seat of our very self, the ‘me’ that flows forth in the powers of knowing and loving. To give ‘my heart’, therefore, cannot be reduced to a maudlin swapping of mutual attractions, desires, or feelings.

To give my heart is to give myself. My whole self.

To love truly is to give ourselves thoroughly away: to give our lives, our liberty, our future, to put ourselves totally in the hands of the beloved. Now, I can perfectly understand that this might be frightening, but I would never argue that withholding myself in the face of this fear was the mark of a superior, a more mature love. In fact, I would argue that it was a feeble love by contrast, a faulty love, a half-hearted love.

When the Israelites were wandering in the desert after God had delivered them from Egypt, they were a bruised people. Four-hundred years of slavery had taught them fear. They had been crushed, abused, and they were filled with suspicion about this God who claimed to love them and want them for His own. Every time things went badly – with the water supply, with the quality of the food, with the comparative size of their enemies – they withdrew their trust, retreating into a self-protecting prudence.

Or so they thought.

The fact was that their best alternative suggestion was to go back to Egypt – back to Pharoah, back to slavery. ‘Protecting their interests’ was really a form of despair. They gave up on promises and possibilities. They gave up on love. This was not ‘brave’, this was not maturity, it was blindness, and to overcome it, God had to resort to pushing them forward rather than letting them fall back into evil.

“I had to show myself their master, says the LORD” in our first reading of this Fifth Sunday of Lent, and we can almost hear His agony in that cry. It was not how it could have been, and He would not let that status quo remain forever. “I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts;” he declares. “I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

This is a love far greater than the pat compromises of despair.

Jesus is the absolute manifestation of this love. He did not hold himself back – either as God or as man. He gave Himself completely to His Father on the Cross, and completely to us. He did not keep His heart to ‘protect it’, or offer only part of it so that when ‘things changed’, he might freely take it back. He accepted death: the most brutal, violent death. He accepted all the abuse, all the suffering that would come of binding Himself to us, and He overcame it for our sake. His heart took on so much that it broke, and then it triumphed. That is love, and it can never be reached by strategic bets or sentimental redefinition.

We will only rob ourselves of the genuine article.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable,” said C. S. Lewis in his book ‘The Four Loves’. “Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

Instead, Jesus invites us to take the leap, to risk being hurt and broken, and He promises us that, whatever the damage, if we accept it through Him, with Him, and in Him, it will never be as final as locking our hearts away.

Are there ways that you have held back from God’s love? Ways that you have bargained with the fear? As we approach the holiest Season of our Church calendar, God gives us these precious Lenten days to rethink all the redefinitions, all the trade-offs and allow Him to open our hearts to the love we have been yearning for. In His act of perfect love, Jesus is drawing all things to Himself, and all true lovers – hearts made clean, pure and ready – will be joined with Him in this total holocaust, this total gift of self to the Father, which is the ultimate union of all the Blessed in Heaven.

Let’s take that risk. Let’s give Him our hearts.

“Whoever loves his life loses it,
and whoever hates his life in this world
will preserve it for eternal life.”