#mothering sunday
HOMILY for the 4th Sun of Lent (Dominican rite)
This past week we completed half our Lenten journey, half of our trek through the wilderness of Lent, and just as Our Lord mercifully feeds his people in the desert, so as to refresh them for the journey home, so the Church mercifully refreshes and encourages us with signs of joy this Sunday, to strength us for the journey up towards Jerusalem, towards the Paschal feasts of Our Lord’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection. Hence this day has been called variously Lætare Sunday, after the opening words of the Officium, “Rejoice O Jerusalem”, or Mid-Lent Sunday, or Refreshment Sunday, or Rose Sunday, or, in our country, Mothering Sunday.
The liturgical reference in the epistle to Jerusalem as our mother, and the words of the entrance antiphon which then speak of Jerusalem as a mother consoling us, her children, after the sorrow of weeping for of our sins, meant that in the Middle Ages, in England, this Sunday was associated with mothers, but particularly with the idea of the Church as our mother who consoles us with the Sacraments and who sets us free from the bondage of sin, as the epistle says, so that we can love truly and thus inherit eternal life. The custom thus arose on this day of visiting the Mother Church of a diocese, the Cathedral, or indeed of visiting the font where we had been baptised. For the font is like the womb of own mother church, our parish church, since it is from the font that we are reborn to eternal life through the Sacrament of Baptism. Nowadays, we focus on our Baptism, renewing our baptismal vows and so on at the Easter Vigil. But in medieval times, it was on this day, the Fourth Sunday of Lent, that our thoughts turned to our Mother the Church giving us new life through Baptism.
These ancient ecclesiastical customs in England account for the fact that for us Mothering Sunday is always kept on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, and it is fitting that we gives thanks to our mothers who gave us natural birth, even as we give thanks to God for the gift of the Church who gave us supernatural birth, by grace, to the Christian life. Thus St Cyprian says: ““No one can have God for his Father, who does not have the Church for his mother.” Hence in the Creed we profess our faith in “one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church”, and as I said last Sunday, we each have a solemn duty to work for the unity of the Church, to be loyal and protective, as it were, to our mother who gives us eternal life, who nourishes us with the Sacraments, and who educates us in faith, leading us to God our Father.
As today’s Gospel suggests, Christ gives us the Sacraments of the Church to refresh us, to give us bread for the journey home. For us Christians, home means heaven, as St Paul says, and so the Church feeds us with the Eucharist that is our food for the journey of life, home to heaven. But as at Mid-Lent, the Church gives us a moment of respite, a moment of joy to take stock of the consolations that God has given us, so in our lifetime, in the pilgrim journey of this life, we are called often to stop and be refreshed by the consolations of God that the Church offers us. In the words of a 9th century hymn for the Dedication of a church: “This is thy palace, here thy presence-chamber, Here may Thy servants, at the mystic banquet, daily adoring, take the body broken; drink of Thy chalice… Here in our sickness healing grace aboundeth, Light in our blindness, in our toil refreshment; Sin is forgiven, hope o’er fear prevaileth; joy over sorrow.” As such, when we think of the Church, the new Jerusalem, our spiritual Mother, so we rejoice and give thanks for the gift of the Church, of her Sacraments, of all those consolations of God that come through the Church.
However, here in this Marian Shrine, we cannot speak of Mother Church without acknowledging Our Lady who “as St Ambrose taught… is a type of the Church in the order of faith, charity and perfect union with Christ.” Indeed, as the Second Vatican Council went on to say, “in the mystery of the Church, which is itself rightly called mother and virgin, the Blessed Virgin stands out in eminent and singular fashion as exemplar both of virgin and mother.” Hence, from ancient times, maybe as early as the 8th century, a golden rose, often ornamented with jewels or scented with perfume, was fashioned and blessed on this day. The rose is, of course, the superlative symbol of Mary, the Mystical Rose; she whom the prophet Isaiah foretold would be the flower springing from the root of Jesse; she whom we honour with spiritual garlands of roses in the form of the Holy Rosary that we pray. The gold from which the rose is made is incorruptible; it does not tarnish, and so it is a symbol both of Mary’s sinless virginity, and also of heaven, of which she is Queen. As such the golden rose directs our thoughts to our heavenly home, that heavenly Jerusalem which is the goal of our earthly journey, which is the focus of our Lenten penances, and the joyful thoughts of that habitation of Our Lady and the Saints draws us forward, encourages onwards in our pilgrim journey of life.
On the fourth Sunday of Lent, then, the popes would bless the golden rose in Rome, and these would later be given to shrines of Our Lady, or to Catholic rulers. For this reason, because the blessing of the golden rose takes place on this day, so the custom arose of wearing rose-coloured vestments on the Fourth Sunday of Lent. It’s a rather roundabout way of getting to pink vestments, and indeed, they’re the most obvious difference that we see on Rose Sunday, but in fact, as is often the case with visible obvious things, they are probably the least important of all the rich liturgical and cultural and theological aspects of this Sunday in Lent. So, have a joyful and blessed Mothering Sunday, Mid-Lent, Refreshment Sunday, Rose Sunday or Lætare Sunday. Whichever you choose to call this day, let us, in the words of the Gradual, rejoice “at the things that were said to me: we shall go into the house of the Lord”. For behold, Easter is but three weeks away – time for me to start painting that Paschal Candle!
