Rose-Colored Robe of Mercy

On this Laetare Sunday, Bishop Erik Varden notes: “There’s a festive expectancy in our liturgy.  The Church likens Lent to a pilgrimage.  Today we stand on a promontory with a view on Jerusalem.  We rejoice in the distance already covered.  We rejoice that our destination is in sight.  In the collect we pray for grace to ‘hasten towards the solemn celebrations to come.’  There has to be a spring in our step.  We are called home.  The word ‘home’ has a sweetness unmatched by any other word.  Our home is not necessarily where we come from.”

Our liturgical texts emphasize Jerusalem as the focus, the home we look toward:

Introit:
Rejoice, Jerusalem, and all who love her.
Be joyful, all who were in mourning;
exult and be satisfied at her consoling breast. (Cf. Is 66: 10-11)

Communion:
Jerusalem is built as a city bonded as one together.
It is there that the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord,
to praise the name of the Lord. (Cf. Ps 122 (121): 3-4)

Responsorial Psalm:
"How could we sing a song of the LORD
    in a foreign land?
If I forget you, Jerusalem,
    may my right hand be forgotten!
May my tongue cleave to my palate
    if I remember you not,
If I place not Jerusalem
    ahead of my joy." (Ps 137 (136):4-6)

In spite of the psalmist’s protestations, we do sing of Jerusalem even while we find ourselves not yet at home, not yet fully consoled, not yet fully bonded together as one.  Indeed, we must sing, lest we forget what home sounds like, lest we stop dreaming of what is prepared for us by the one who calls us to our one and only home.

To shift metaphors a little, I find myself fascinated by the cover image of this month’s Magnificat.  The March issue bears a very unusual image: a young man in a rose-colored cloak barefoot and reaching up to receive a book from a hand in the sky.  This is Moses, in an image from St Catherine’s Monastery on Mt Sinai, described by the editors this way:

“He is covered with a large shawl with which he covers his shoulders and hands, so as to receive the sacred Tables with dignity. Likewise the priests of the New Covenant cover themselves with the humeral veil (from the Latin humerus: “shoulder”) in order to carry the Blessed Sacrament.”
“The Moses depicted here plainly is thirty-three years old, the age of Jesus at his death, and he is covered prophetically with a rose-colored veil, signifying the Divine Sonship.”

Moses/Jesus wears the rose-colored vestment designating Laetare Sunday, like a robe of mercy thrown over our Lenten penitence.  I do not know why exactly the rose-colored garment stands for Divine Sonship, but I can say that it acts as a metaphor for our own embrace in the ample folds of adoptive sonship, of the warmth and light of belonging to God, of being drawn towards the place God has prepared for us.

We may be just a little flock, struggling to make ends meet, trying to find our way forward in the great uncertainties of our time, feeling the fear and trepidation in the face of what is being asked of us, but it is in allowing ourselves to feel that fear that we learn how to trust, how to have confidence in God who draws us together as one.  Today we are gathered into this rose-colored robe of mercy, still singing of Jerusalem, putting our trust in the One who has promised to bring us home.

Sources:

https://coramfratribus.com/words-on-the-word/4-sunday-of-lent/

https://us.magnificat.net/magnificat_content/moses-the-lawgiver-who-prefigures-christ-who-is-to-come/

Image: Icon of Moses Receiving the Law at St Catherine's Monastery, Mt Sinai