OPEN YOUR RIBS.

A Meditation on the Pierced Heart.

When the soldier drove the spear upward into the ribcage of a dying man, was he aiming for the heart — or simply verifying death?

Did he expect blood? Did he expect water? Did he expect a Church to sprout from the place where steel entered flesh?

John does not linger on the mechanics, but he lingers on the flow. 

“Immediately there came out blood and water.” The word used here is Ἐξῆλθεν, or It went forth, or it became uncontained.

Like water from the Temple in Ezekiel. Like water from the rock struck in the wilderness.

The soldier thought he was ending something. But he was opening something.

He was confirming death. But he revealed life.

The spear did not create love. It exposed a primordial love. A love as old as Adam. A love as ancient as God. 

The wound of Christ’s flesh was inflicted by force. But the wound of His heart had already been there.

The spear reached muscle. But the heart had been pierced long, long before.

We fixate on the visible wound,  the torn side, the blood, the water, but the mystics have always spoken of a deeper piercing.

“You have wounded my heart,” the Bridegroom says in the Song.

Long before steel split the skin, love had already split the interior. Long before blood flowed from His side, affection had already made Him vulnerable.

The side wound made visible what the heart wound had carried in secret.

And if that is true, then Lent is not only about contemplating His wound.

It is about discovering our own.

We speak easily of the Sacred Heart, as if it were safely framed in gold and thorns. But the heart He reveals is not an object for admiration. It is a pattern.

If love pierced Him before steel did, then love must pierce us too.

The question is not whether Christ was wounded.

The question is whether we will be.

So…

Rend your hearts.

Not in quiet sentiment. Not in performative sorrow. Not in commercialized aesthetic.

Tear. Open. Your. Heart.

Stop admiring the pierced One from a safe distance. Stop tracing the wound with language while guarding your own ribs.

Look at Him!

The side opened by steel. The Heart opened long before it.

He did not keep His love contained.

Why do you?

Rend your hearts.

Let love split the interior. Let it unmake your careful obedience. Let it ruin your need to be understood. Let it undo the version of you that prefers to remain intact.

Do not sing of the Sacred Heart if you will not risk your own.

Let Him wound you in love.

Not soft love. Not perfumed love. Dangerous love.

The kind that exposes you. The kind that costs you. The kind that rearranges the inside of a man.

The kind that pierced Him before the spear ever did.

Rend your hearts.

Because the only hearts that resemble His are the ones that have been opened.

And love, real love, is never safe.

SO BLEED.