Today’s first reading has Noah sending forth a dove after God ‘baptized the earth’ with the great flood. It didn’t return (Gn 8:12). The next time we see a dove in Scripture is at Jesus’ baptism by John (Lk 3:22).
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Noah sent the dove to find dry land, for their salvation. If you look at it symbolically with a little imagination, one might see that Instead of returning, the dove lands on Jesus centuries later, who is the ‘land’ of salvation coming forth from the water (of baptism). Noah and his ark is a foreshadowed prefigurement of Jesus and His Church. The Holy Spirit in the form of a dove is God’s sanctifying power.
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But the speculative imagination can go further. At least mine does. Before Noah sent the dove that didn’t return, he sent it and it did return – with an olive leaf in its beak. The olive is a sign of the Prince of Peace who, on the Mount of ‘Olives’ in the Garden of ‘Gethsemane’ (which means ‘olive-press’) gave His will formally to the Father to be crucified for our salvation (“not My will be done, but Yours”). The tree of life in Eden, which I like to think was an olive tree, was thus retaken by the ‘new Adam’ and placed at Calgary, whose cross becomes humanity’s new tree of life. The hanging fruit of this ‘olive’ wood is Jesus, consumed in the Eucharist, to restore eternal life to those who partake.
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Noah’s dove (i.e. the Holy Spirit), twice, points to Jesus.