Rainbows: revealing the beauty of God

Our first reading this Sunday speaks of the rainbow as the sign of God’s Covenant with Noah that “the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all things of flesh” (Genesis 9:15).

We might think of white light as being of just one boring and uninteresting colour; but the rainbow reveals, through the prism of water droplets, that the light from the sun is in fact composed of a whole range of wavelengths perceived by us as beautiful colours. If you are reading this meditation on our monochrome printed bulletin, you really should view it too on our colour website to get the benefit of the photo above – although even that is only an approximation to the true glory of the rainbow using just mixtures of the three colours detectable by the cone cells of the human retina.

St Peter in the second reading compares the waters of the flood to the waters of baptism, and the saving of Noah and his family to the salvation by that sacrament of faith. It is possible to talk about God without faith: philosophers have been doing so for millennia, though such a God can seem dry and remote, boring and uninteresting. It is through the prism of the waters of baptism and by faith that God can be perceived in something of his beauty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

That beauty we see too in the various liturgical seasons with their colours. As we start Lent we begin in the violet of penitence at the bottom of the rainbow; but we shall ascend, come Easter, to the golden yellow joy of the resurrection and come Pentecost to the red of the Holy Spirit. And we hope one day to be brought through faith in Christ to the glory of the kingdom when the full spectrum of God’s beauty will be visible to us.

How marvellous to see something of that destination as we begin our Lenten pilgrimage!

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