ARK OF THE COVENANT

 A SERMON FOR MARYMAS

In the Litany of Loreto, we ask our blessed Lady to intercede for us.  We list her titles, one by one, titles that describe various aspects of our Lady and her beatific status.  We call her “Mother most pure,” “Virgin most prudent,” and so on, and we ask her to pray for us, understanding that we who are not “most pure” or “most prudent” very much need her prayers.  But then we come to a series of invocations that are not so obvious, “Mystical Rose, for example, “Tower of Ivory.” These require a bit more thought to figure out their meaning, and I wonder how many of us take the time to dwell on these deeper and more problematic titles of our Lady as we rattle off our litany.  Probably, most of us are content to just entrust our prayers to her, not knowing what the titles mean or why we’re praying them.  Today, though, we’re going to give one of those titles the closer look it deserves.  It’s the one where we refer to our blessed Lady as “Ark of the Covenant.” 

If we think about it for a few seconds, we should be able to piece together at least some superficial reasons why she is called by this name.  The word “Ark” means vessel, like Noah’s Ark, the vessel that not only carried but protected mankind and all the animal species from extinction in the Great Flood.  But then there’s the original Old Testament Ark of the Covenant itself.  This was also a vessel.  It carried three items, three things that were sufficient to represent the covenant between God and man.  They symbolized the three most important aspects of God’s interaction with mankind, the covenant that he had established for the Jews of the Old Testament, symbols of God’s protection, nourishment and guidance of man, who would thereby be saved, not just from drowning in a physical flood, but from spiritual and eternal extinction.

For us today, we should be thrilled to be reminded once again that what God did for the Jews in the Old Testament was merely a shadow of what he would do for us in the New.  Our blessed Lord established the new Covenant with man by shedding his Most Precious Blood as the sacrifice of reparation for our sins.  This new and everlasting covenant is continued to this day and will continue into the uncertain future we now face.  It continues through the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  So now… how does this apply to the Blessed Virgin Mary?  Why do we call her the Ark of this new and everlasting Covenant?

For a start, it’s obvious that our Blessed Lady was also a vessel.  She was the vessel that contained, in her womb, the Son of God himself, the Saviour of mankind.  Like Noah’s Ark before her, she was the vessel that would save mankind from destruction.  And like the original Ark of the Covenant, the Deliverer she carried within her would save mankind from eternal death, from the eternal punishment due to our sins.

But what, you might ask, were those three precious items contained in the Ark of the Covenant?  And how do they apply to the Blessed Mother?  This is the most fascinating thing of all.  For we can compare these three contents with the holy Child our Lady carried within her, and see just how closely the first Ark prefigured this Mother of God who was to be the second Ark, the Ark of the New Covenant between God and man. 

Inside the Ark of the Covenant, there were first of all the two tablets of stone containing the ten commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai.  The words on these two stone tablets had been written by the hand of God himself, so that by obeying his laws, the Jews might save their souls.  And how did our Lady fulfill this prefiguration of the Old Testament?  Because there, in her womb, were not merely the words of God written on stones, but the living Word of God himself, the Word made flesh, forming over the course of nine months into the Son of Man who would fulfill all the law and the prophets.  This Word of God would tell us that the Ten Commandments and all the other laws of the Old Testament depend upon only one law, which is to love the Lord thy God with all thy soul, all thy mind, and all thy strength.  And our Lady was the chosen one, sinless and immaculate, who accepted her role to carry this Child without hesitation or deviation from her innocence.  She is truly the Ark of the new and everlasting Covenant.

But there are two other items within the original Ark.  The Hebrews, following Moses through the wilderness towards the Promised Land, had been fed directly by God.  He did not permit them to starve in the desert, but rained down Manna from heaven, what they called Manna, or the “Bread of Angels.”  One of these pieces of Manna had been carefully preserved and was placed in the Ark of the Covenant as a reminder of how God had nourished his children in the wilderness, and protected them from starvation and death.  Our blessed Lady carried within her not Manna, which was after all the mere foreshadowing of something infinitely greater that was to come, but the fulfillment of that shadow, the true “Bread of Angels.”  We think of the tabernacles in our churches and the Real Presence that dwells in them, the Eucharistic miracle of the Real Presence.  Holy Mary was the first such tabernacle, holding within her body the living Bread, giving birth to this bread in Beth-lehem, the “House of Bread.”  As our Lord himself told the Jews, “I am that bread of life.  This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever.”

Finally, the third item contained in the Ark of the Covenant was the staff of Aaron.  Aaron was the brother of Moses.  When Moses complained to God that he had a speech impediment and would have a hard time delivering God’s message to Pharaoh, God appointed Aaron to be his brother’s spokesman, the intermediary between God and man.  And isn’t that the very role our Blessed Lady plays, interceding between us and God, placing our prayers before the throne of God and asking him our behalf to answer them?   Aaron, who was of the tribe of Levi, was eventually established by God as the first priest, appointed to offer sacrifice to God in the name of the people.  His appointment created the institution of the priesthood, and Aaron’s sons and descendants, and the Levites continued to offer sacrifice in the temple of Jerusalem until, born of the Virgin Mary, our Lord came to offer the ultimate sacrifice of all.  Again, the priesthood of Aaron was the Old Testament shadow of the true priesthood of Christ.  Their sacrifices of lambs and oxen merely prefigured the infinite sacrifice of Mary’s Son who was also the Son of God.  He was the one and only true Priest, for he alone was capable of offering the only sacrifice that was sufficient to make reparation for the infinite number and magnitude of the sins of mankind.  While the staff of Aaron contained in the Ark of the Covenant was merely the symbol of this priesthood which was in turn merely a symbol of what was to come, the child our Lady carried was the actual fulfillment of that priesthood, whose Precious Blood spilled on Calvary was the Blood of the New and Everlasting Covenant, the Redemption of all mankind.  

To sum up, then, the Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament was pointing forward to a far greater Ark of the Covenant in the New Testament, Mary, who carried the living Word of God, the living Bread of Angels, and the one true Priest and Saviour.  How could we even think for a moment that this new Noah’s Ark, this Ark of salvation would not herself be saved from sinking beneath the waves of death?  Like the Ark of Noah, when the time came, she would finally come to rest upon a safe haven, not upon a high mountain like Mount Ararat, but even higher, in the most exalted heights of heaven itself.  Like Moses on Mount Sinai before her, she would be taken up into the clouds to be greeted by God himself, not with tablets of stone, but the Word made Flesh, her beloved Son in all his glory.  The Bread of Angels which had come down from heaven and rested in her arms as she fed him now carries her back into heaven where she finds her rest in his arms.  His sacrifice on the Cross, beneath which she had stood and offered her own sacrifice of sorrow, still continues as the Sacrifice of the Mass, the same source of all grace which all along had made everything possible, from her Immaculate Conception to her Assumption into heaven.  Like the Son she once carried, she is now carried by him, body and soul, into heaven.