God With Us
God is truly with us (Immanuel, עִמָּנוּאֵל Hebrew, “God with us”). When we come to Him for worship, for Scripture study, for meditation on His mysteries, or with a question or petition vital to our lives, we can meet Him and speak with Him heart to heart. As far above us as He is, He desires to be with us intimately. We know this from Moses and the Prophets, and we know this from the Incarnation of God the Son as our Lord Jesus. God’s Heart is present to us in the celebration of Mass and in the reception of Holy Communion, but not only then. When we come to the Blessed Sacrament well disposed to pray, God is with us, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The promise of God-with-us has a powerful Biblical resonance.
Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. (Isaiah 7:14; KJV)
behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and his name shall be called Emman′u-el” (which means, God with us). (Matthew 1:20-23; RSV)
In The Complete Jewish Study Bible, David Stern explains how these two prophetic passages, coming from different historical contexts, can still be fundamentally connected. Isaiah gave his prophecy to Ahaz, king of Judah, who was concerned that the Northern Kingdom, Israel, had allied with Syria (Aram) to fight against Judah. Although God was impatient with Ahaz, who refused to ask for a sign, the Lord chose to announce a sign anyway through his prophet. This sign–the birth of a child named Immanu-El, “God with us”– was a means of comfort for the future. Stern shows that Matthew was using an accepted means of interpreting Scripture by analogy or “symbolic hints” in his account of the birth of Jesus.*
By pointing back to Yesha’yahu’s [Isaiah’s] account, Mattityahu (Matthew) reminds the people of his day that, in the same miraculous way God gave the people of Y’hudah [Judah] a sign of comfort, the miraculous birth of another young boy, Yeshua, is a miraculous sign to God’s people. (Stern, “The Virgin Birth,” in The Complete Jewish Study Bible, 497)
Indeed, news of the miraculous birth of Yeshua, Jesus, was meant to be a comfort not only to the troubled heart of the righteous man, Saint Joseph, but also to the whole Jewish people who were awaiting their Messiah, especially in those times of the Roman occupation of Israel. When Jesus walked among his people, preaching and teaching, he offered the hope of salvation unto eternal life. Before he left them for Heaven, Jesus commissioned his Apostles (and their spiritual descendants) with the great task of spreading the Gospel from Israel to all the nations (Matthew 28:18-20), thereby fulfilling the prophecy to Abraham (Genesis 12:1-3) that all the nations would be blessed through him and the people God chose for Himself.
However, Jesus knew that his disciples all over the world would have a long time to wait for this to be completed. His Word would need to spread to the ends of the earth and down through many centuries, so that as many people as possible could choose faith and friendship with God, their Father, for eternity:
But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness, but is forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. (2 Peter 3: 8-9)
At the end of time, there would be the great sign of Jesus’s Second Coming, foretold in the Book of Daniel (7:13-14): And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory (Luke 21:27). But he would not leave them orphans until then. Far from it. He promised to send them another Counselor, the Holy Spirit, to dwell with them and be in them (John 14:16-17). He also left them himself in an intimate way in the Holy Eucharist, which he instituted at the Last Supper (Matthew 26:26-29; Mark 14:22-25; Luke 22:14-20; see also John 6:25-69, the Bread of Life discourse). When duly ordained priests consecrate Bread and Wine, acting in persona Christi (in the person of Christ), they repeat the same words of institution that Jesus spoke. They are empowered to call down the action of the Holy Spirit, which makes Jesus truly and wholly present to us in the sacred elements, albeit in a hidden way.** Whether we consume the Host in Holy Communion or adore it during Mass or at a later time, Jesus is truly present to us, as he promised:
lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. (Matthew 28:20b; KJV)
There are many ways to explain and defend this mystery of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The Catechism of the Catholic Church does this very well, and relates it to this reality of “God With Us”:
It is highly fitting that Christ should have wanted to remain present to his Church in this unique way. Since Christ was about to take his departure from his own in his visible form, he wanted to give us his sacramental presence; since he was about to offer himself on the cross to save us, he wanted us to have the memorial of the love with which he loved us “to the end” [John 13:1], even to the giving of his life. In his Eucharistic presence he remains mysteriously in our midst as the one who loved us and gave himself up for us [cf. Galatians 2:20], and he remains under signs that express and communicate this love… (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd edition, 1380)
Thus, Jesus in the Eucharist, or the Blessed Sacrament (as it is called outside of Mass), is a new sign of Immanuel, God being with his people. After two thousand years, any person can still experience this sense of God being truly present, not only in his Word, the Bible, but also in the Eucharist: just walk into any Church which keeps the Blessed Sacrament in its Tabernacle on the altar, open your heart, and begin to pray. This happened to me about 11 years ago, when I walked into Cîteaux Abbey, near Dijon, France. I knew something was different from the churches I had grown up in, sincerely devout as they were. I was never the same after that, and there in that Church began a longing for the “bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die.” Jesus said, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh” (John 6:51). In the end, it is all about a meeting of two hearts, God’s heart and ours.
God’s Heart and Our Hearts
In his essential book, The Devotion to the Sacred Heart, Fr. John Croiset expressed well the connection between the Blessed Sacrament and Jesus’ enduring love for us:
What motive induced Jesus Christ to remain with us after the work of our redemption was accomplished, and after His glorious Ascension into Heaven? Why does He return to our earth every day in an invisible manner? Why does He remain day and night in a humble and obscure state on our altars, except that He cannot endure to be separated from men; that His delight is to be with the children of men? (p. 191)
When we do find it in our hearts to come to God–whether we are praying at home, attending worship, or visiting the Blessed Sacrament in an adoration chapel–it is often in a spirit of repentance and supplication. We ask the Lord to repair and heal our wounded hearts and fill us with Himself–with his Spirit, with his love. The penitential Psalm of David, especially this verse, expresses this desire well:
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me. (Psalm 51:10)
In our hearts, we hope that God will respond by renewing his promises within us:
I have loved you with an everlasting love;
therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. (Jeremiah 31:3)
And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. You shall dwell in the land which I gave to your fathers; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. (Ezekiel 36:26-28)
The longings of our hearts are more than matched, indeed far surpassed, by the longings of God’s heart for each of us, his children.
“Can a woman forget her sucking child,
that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb?
Even these may forget,
yet I will not forget you.
Behold, I have graven you on the palms of my hands” (Isaiah 49:15-16)
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)
The revelations of the Sacred Heart of Jesus were given to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque during her times of prayer and adoration in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. There she met Jesus in his Real Presence, the great gift sustaining his Church during the long years from his Ascension to his Second Coming, which we still await.
“Being before the Blessed Sacrament one day…, I received from my God signal tokens of His love, and felt urged with the desire of making Him some return, and of rendering Him love for love” (The Autobiography of Saint Margaret Mary, p. 95)
Jesus spoke to her heart about his own, and repeated to her what he wished her to do, in order to make his Heart more loved and better understood. The fire of love in his Heart for humanity was so great, he wished to wake people from their indifference so that they might come to receive the lavish but unappreciated graces that flowed continually from his Heart.
“Behold this heart which has loved men so much, that It has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming Itself, in order to testify to them Its love; and in return I receive from the greater number nothing but ingratitude by reason of their irreverence and sacrileges, and by the coldness and contempt which they show Me in this Sacrament of Love. … Therefore, I ask of thee that the Friday after the Octave of Corpus Christi be set apart for a special Feast to honor My Heart, by communicating on that day and making reparation to It by a solemn act, in order to make amends for the indignities which It has received during the time It has been exposed on the altars. (The Autobiography of Saint Margaret Mary, pp. 95-96)
And this was back in June 1765! Presumably this was an era of more widespread faith in God than we see around us now, and still, Jesus felt the coldness accorded to his Heart in the Sacrament of his Love. Love growing cold among God’s believers is nothing new, in Biblical terms. In Revelations 2, we read Christ’s complaint from Heaven to the 1st-century church at Ephesus:
I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake, and you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then from what you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first. (Rev 2:3-5)
This passage at the end of the Bible joins a long list of prophecies, in which God entreats his people, Israel, to return to their first love, their bond of mutual loving friendship with him, as it was meant to be. God holds repeated dialogues with his people through his prophets.
Hosea: God’s Call to Return in Love
The passages in the book of the prophet Hosea are particularly poignant, illustrating well these sacred exchanges between God and his people. After speaking at length about his people’s unfaithfulness, their “adultery” with other gods (the Ba’als), the Lord disclosed his persistent plans to win them back and love them again:
“Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.
And there I will give her her vineyards,
and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth,
as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.
“And in that day, says the Lord, you will call me, ‘My husband,’ and no longer will you call me, ‘My Ba′al.’ For I will remove the names of the Ba′als from her mouth, and they shall be mentioned by name no more. (Hosea 2:14-17; RSV)
But the people did not repent, so the Lord was moved to utter more expressions of His anger and predictions of the judgments to come. At last, Israel said, “Come, let us return to the Lord; for he has torn, that he may heal us; he has stricken, and he will bind us up” (Hoses 6:1). The Lord, however, knew their fickleness:
What shall I do with you, O E′phraim?
What shall I do with you, O Judah?
Your love is like a morning cloud,
like the dew that goes early away. (Hosea 6:4)
God must teach human beings to recognize all the ways they have strayed:
Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets,
I have slain them by the words of my mouth,
and my judgment goes forth as the light.
For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings. (Hosea 6:5-6)
Yet, God’s heart continued to be moved by love, and He professed His mercy:
When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.
The more I called them,
the more they went from me;
they kept sacrificing to the Ba′als,
and burning incense to idols.
Yet it was I who taught E′phraim to walk,
I took them up in my arms;
but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with cords of compassion,
with the bands of love,
and I became to them as one
who eases the yoke on their jaws,
and I bent down to them and fed them. (Hosea 11:1-4)
The Lord knew that Assyria would soon conquer Israel, the Northern Kingdom (also called Ephraim), that He would allow this misfortune and chastisement. Yet God’s heart was wounded at the thought!
How can I give you up, O E′phraim!
How can I hand you over, O Israel!
How can I make you like Admah!
How can I treat you like Zeboi′im!
My heart recoils within me,
my compassion grows warm and tender.
I will not execute my fierce anger,
I will not again destroy E′phraim;
for I am God and not man,
the Holy One in your midst,
and I will not come to destroy. (Hosea 11:8-9)
The final chapter (14) of Hosea is all about God’s plea for reconciled love. He pleaded once again for his people to return to Him, and He even gave them the right words to say. His offer of loving care and blessings, as ever, would greatly exceed their asking. Here is just the first part of what the Lord promised:
I will heal their faithlessness;
I will love them freely,
for my anger has turned from them.
I will be as the dew to Israel;
he shall blossom as the lily,
he shall strike root as the poplar;
his shoots shall spread out;
his beauty shall be like the olive,
and his fragrance like Lebanon. (Hosea 14:4-6)
This promise was for ancient Israel; through Abraham and through Israel’s Messiah, this promise of blessing also extends to us today, if only we return to Him. If we come and ask for his saving help, He will dwell with us and make His home in our hearts.
Closing Thoughts and a Prayer
One place to have this prayerful meeting with God is before the Blessed Sacrament during a time of Adoration. We can come to the Blessed Sacrament as to a “refuge,” and “dwell in the shelter of the Most High” (Psalm 91:1), and ask for the Lord’s protection in whatever we are facing.
Because he cleaves to me in love, I will deliver him;
I will protect him, because he knows my name.
When he calls to me, I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble,
I will rescue him and honor him.
With long life I will satisfy him,
and show him my salvation. (Psalm 91:14-16)
In one of his sermons, St. Bernard comments on part of verse 15, “I will be with him in trouble,” marveling at the unheard-of gift inherent in this promise. Bernard goes so far as to ask, “why do I seek anything but times of trouble? It is good for me to be at God’s side, and not only that, but to have the Lord as my refuge” (Navarre Bible: The Psalms, p. 313n). Bernard goes on to recall that God “delights” to be with us, and therefore he, Bernard, wishes to be nowhere but with God:
“He is called Emmanuel, which means ‘God-is-with-us’. He comes down from heaven to be close to those whose hearts are troubled, to be with us in our times of trial. […] For me, Lord, it is better to suffer distress with you than to reign as king without you or to live in peace without you or to win glory without you. It is better, Lord, that I unite myself more closely to you in times of trouble, to have you by my side though the tests of fire, than to be without you in this present life or in heaven.” (p. 313n)
Until Heaven is our home, we have God-with-us, Immanuel. God the Son, Jesus, is with us in Holy Scripture, both Old and New Testaments. He is with us when we pray, especially when “two or three” gather for prayer. He is with us when we love one another as he loved us. He is with us when we listen to the quiet voice of the Holy Spirit in the temple of our own hearts. And, He is with us in the special way that He left to us, the Eucharist, and in the Blessed Sacrament. We may not always hear an answer to the questions we put to His Heart; many times we are simply called to rest on it, in a more peaceful knowing that He is with us, in loving faithfulness.
Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. (Psalm 90)
In her Diary, St Faustina recorded these words of Jesus to her:
I want to tell you that eternal life must begin already here on earth through Holy Communion. Each Holy Communion makes you more capable of communing with God throughout eternity. (1811)
If we are not able to receive Holy Communion, as it has been for some months now in the worldwide Church, or if we cannot receive sacramentally for any reason, we can still make a spiritual communion, asking the Lord to come into our hearts, to stay with us, and never to leave us.
May the Heart of Jesus in the Most Blessed Sacrament
be blessed, adored and loved with grateful affection,
at every moment, in all the tabernacles of the world,
even to the end of time.***
Notes:
* “Remez (symbolic hints) understand that meaning is sometimes provided both within and beyond the historical setting of a word or concept” ( David Stern, The Complete Jewish Study Bible, p. 497).
** For further explanation of the Eucharist and the Real Presence of Christ, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2nd ed.), New York: Doubleday, 1995, especially paragraphs 1333-1344, 1373-1381; see also the Online edition, with flipbook. On the inherent relation of the Sacred Heart to the Eucharist, see especially Devotion to the Sacred Heart by Fr. John A. Hardon and The Devotion to the Sacred Heart by Fr. John Croiset.
***A closing prayer of the Chaplet of the Sacred Heart.
Resources:
The Complete Jewish Study Bible: Insights for Jews and Christians (David H. Stern, Trans. & Rabbi Barry A. Rubin, Ed.). Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1998 and 2016 (updated).
The Autobiography of Saint Margaret Mary by Margaret Mary Alacoque. Charlotte, NC: TAN Books, 2012. (from 1930 English edition, by Sisters of the Visitation)
The Navarre Bible: The Psalms and the Song of Solomon. Four Courts Press/Scepter Publishers, 2003.
Devotion to the Sacred Heart by Fr John A. Hardon. Bardstown, KY: Eternal Life, 2009.
The Devotion to the Sacred Heart by Fr. John Croiset. TAN Books, 2007. (Originally published 1689)
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