Children of the Free Woman: Rejoicing in Our Mother the Church
MASS Laetare
LESSON Galatians 4: 22-31
GOSPEL St John 6: 1-15
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV
Beloved in Christ,
In the midst of the Lenten desert the Church suddenly commands us to lift up our eyes. The very first word of today’s Mass rings out like a trumpet across the wilderness: Laetare — Rejoice.
Laetare Jerusalem: et conventum facite omnes qui diligitis eam.
“Rejoice, O Jerusalem, and come together all you that love her.”
For three weeks the Church has led us through the discipline of Lent—through fasting, prayer, repentance, and the searching of conscience. Lent strips away illusions. It exposes our weaknesses. It reminds us that we are sinners who must return to God.
Yet today, almost at the very midpoint of the sacred fast, Holy Mother Church pauses and commands us to rejoice.
Why?
Because penance without hope would crush the human heart.
Lent teaches us three things:
to repent of sin,
to detach from the world,
and to long for heaven.
We are not walking toward Good Friday alone.
We are walking toward Easter.
Saint Leo the Great taught that the Church wisely tempers the austerity of the fast with consolation, lest the spirit grow weary before reaching the feast of the Resurrection. Even in the desert the light of Easter begins already to dawn.
For in the Christian mystery sorrow never has the final word.
The Cross blossoms into Resurrection.
And so the liturgy softens today.
The sombre violet of penance becomes rose, a colour that mingles sorrow and joy, sacrifice and promise. The desert of Lent is touched for a moment by the springtime of Easter.
For centuries in Rome the Pope would bless on this day the Golden Rose, a symbol of Christ Himself. The rose blooms among thorns; beauty springs from suffering; life emerges from sacrifice. It is an image of the mystery we celebrate today.
Thus the Church calls this day Laetare Sunday, Rose Sunday, and sometimes Refreshment Sunday—a moment of encouragement for pilgrims who are still journeying through the desert.
But in this land the day has long been known as Mothering Sunday.
Today we rightly give thanks for our earthly mothers, through whom God granted us the gift of life. Yet the deeper meaning of the day lies within the liturgy itself.
In earlier centuries Christians would return on this day to their mother church—the church where they had been baptised, or the cathedral, the mother church of the diocese. Servants and apprentices who lived far from home were often given leave to return to their families and to the church that had given them new birth in Christ.
This custom reflects the profound theology proclaimed in today’s Epistle from Saint Paul to the Galatians.
The Apostle speaks of two Jerusalems. One is the earthly Jerusalem, associated with Mount Sinai and the covenant of the Law. The other is the Jerusalem above, the heavenly city of freedom.
And Paul declares: “Jerusalem which is above is free, and she is our mother.”
Paul writes these words in response to the first great controversy in the life of the Church. Some believed that Gentile converts must first become Jews—that they must accept circumcision and the Mosaic law in order to belong fully to the people of God.
But Paul insists that the promise given to Abraham has now reached its fulfilment. The people of God are no longer defined by blood or race, but by faith and grace. To explain this he recalls the story of Abraham’s two sons.
Ishmael was born of Hagar, the slave woman. Isaac was born of Sarah, the free woman. Hagar represents Sinai—the covenant of the Law which leads to bondage. Sarah represents the covenant of promise fulfilled in Christ. And therefore Paul concludes:
“We, brethren, are not children of the slave woman but of the free.”
Through Baptism we have been born into that freedom. The Church therefore becomes our mother because through her we receive the life of Christ. Saint Cyprian spoke this truth with striking clarity:
“He cannot have God as Father who does not have the Church as Mother.”
The Church gives us life in Baptism, truth in her teaching, and healing in the sacraments. She forms our minds through the Gospel. She restores our souls through the sacrament of penance. And above all she nourishes us with the Bread of Heaven.
It is no accident that the Gospel today recounts the miracle of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. This miracle stands at the centre of the Gospel tradition, for it is the only miracle—apart from the Resurrection—recorded in all four Gospels. A great multitude follows Christ into the wilderness. They come seeking hope, healing, truth. And when they are hungry, Christ feeds them. Five loaves. Two fishes. And thousands are satisfied.
Saint John tells us that the Passover was near, reminding us that this miracle stands on the threshold of the mystery of the Eucharist. The miracle recalls the manna in the desert, when God fed Israel during their forty years of wandering. But the Fathers of the Church saw deeper meanings within it. The five loaves, they said, recall the five books of the Law, the Pentateuch, which nourished Israel but could not give eternal life.
Christ takes that bread, blesses it, and multiplies it, showing that the Law finds its fulfilment in Him. And when the crowd has eaten their fill, twelve baskets of fragments remain—a figure of the twelve Apostles, through whom the Bread of Life would be distributed to the whole world.
Saint Augustine observed that in the miracle Christ multiplied bread. But in the Eucharist He becomes the Bread.
Saint John Chrysostom likewise taught that Christ first satisfies the bodily hunger of the crowd in order to lead them to a greater mystery.
For the Lord does not merely satisfy earthly hunger. He prepares the hearts of the faithful for the heavenly banquet. Thus what once took place upon the hillside of Galilee continues here at this altar.
Christ still feeds His people.
He who multiplied the loaves now gives Himself to His Church as the true Bread from Heaven. Even now the mystery of the Cross is already bearing fruit.
The Cross blossoms into Resurrection, and from that sacrifice flows the Bread of Life that sustains the Church.
Notice how the liturgy today continually returns to the image of Jerusalem. The Introit commands us: Laetare Jerusalem.
The Gradual echoes the Psalmist: Laetatus sum in his quae dicta sunt mihi: in domum Domini ibimus. “I rejoiced when they said unto me: we shall go into the house of the Lord.”
The Tract reminds us that those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Sion, which cannot be moved. And at Holy Communion the Church sings the song of pilgrimage: “Jerusalem which is built as a city compact together; for thither the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord, to praise the name of the Lord.”
The entire Mass therefore becomes a journey toward the city of God.
And this brings us to the Station Church of today.
In Rome the faithful gather for this Mass at the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, built by Saint Helena after she brought relics of the True Cross from the Holy Land to Rome. By doing so she symbolically brought Jerusalem itself to Rome.
Wherever the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is offered, the mystery of Calvary becomes present again.
The altar becomes the meeting place of heaven and earth.
The Cross stands at the centre of the city of God.
And the heavenly Jerusalem is opened to us.
Soon the liturgy will lead us into the solemn days of Passiontide. The sacred images will be veiled. The Church will guide us step by step toward Calvary.
But today she lifts our eyes toward the horizon.
Just as the apostles were granted a glimpse of Christ’s glory on Mount Tabor before they would witness His agony in Gethsemane, so today we are given a foretaste of the joy that lies beyond the Passion.
For we know where this road leads.
The Cross blossoms into Resurrection.
The Bread that feeds us in this desert is the pledge of the eternal banquet of the heavenly Jerusalem, where the children of God will gather around the Lamb who was slain and who lives forever.
The sacrament we receive now under the veils of bread and wine will one day give way to the unveiled vision of Christ Himself, when faith shall become sight and the pilgrims of earth shall become the citizens of heaven.
There the shadows of this world will pass away.
There the exile will end.
There the children of the Church will behold their Lord face to face.
Therefore let us continue our Lenten pilgrimage with courage.
Let us persevere in prayer.
Let us persevere in penance.
Let us persevere in hope.
For the desert of Lent will open at last into the garden of Easter, and the children of the Church will dwell forever in the city whose builder and maker is God.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
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