Today is June 18, Wednesday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time.
We read at today’s Mass, “God is able to make every grace abundant for you, so that in all things, always having all you need, you may have an abundance for every good work” (2 Cor 9:8).
This verse from today’s Mass is astonishing in its confidence: God is able to make every grace abundant for you. And yet, for many of us, these words are hard to accept. Why? Because something deep within us is broken — wounded by original sin. This wound distorts our sense of justice, twisting it into a craving for perfect equality on this side of heaven, something we’ll never fully attain. And it distorts our sense of need.
So often, we confuse wants with needs. We convince ourselves that if we just had that one more thing — a better job, a healthier body, a smoother path — then we’d be complete. But God’s Word today tells us something radically different: that he gives us what we truly need, and that is enough.
A confidence that comes from divine love
Pope Pius XII, in his encyclical on the Sacred Heart, echoes this message. He writes that the Christian covenant is not rooted in fear or slavery, but in the friendship of a child with his Father. That covenant, he says, is “strengthened and nourished by a more generous outpouring of divine grace and truth,” fulfilling St. John’s words: “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.”
The Sacred Heart of Jesus reveals this truth. In the Heart of Christ, we find not just affection or sentiment but the confidence that comes from divine love. The love that saves. The love that provides. The love that knows what we need before we do.
Think of the most famous verse in all of Scripture: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (Jn 3:16). That love is not vague or abstract. It’s deeply personal. The Father sent the Son to take on our human frailty and to pour himself out for us on the cross. That’s the infinite charity of the Sacred Heart.
We may not always receive what we want. But in the Sacred Heart, we are promised what we need: salvation, grace and the abiding presence of God.
Let us pray,
O God, strength of those who hope in you, graciously hear our pleas, and, since without you mortal frailty can do nothing, grant us always the help of your grace, that in following your commands we may please you by our resolve and our deeds. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.
