Vigil of the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
When I was a child, I went to a movie with my dad. We were going to see the new “Star Trek” move that had just come out. Not long after we arrived, the lights went down, and we got ready for the beginning of the movie. The music that started to play was different than I expected, but I thought maybe it was on purpose. And then, as images started to display on the screen, there was the image of two babies that had just been born. Again, not what I expected, but I thought maybe it was doing a flashback to some character’s birth. In fact, they had put the wrong movie in the theater, and we were being shown “Twins” with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito; very different from “Star Trek.”
Perhaps you had a similar feeling as you sat down and started to listen to the first reading. What does David and the Ark of the Covenant have to do with the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary? And that confusion was likely continued in the psalm response, and we sang, “Lord, go up to the place of your rest, you and the ark of your holiness.” Then, as the second reading started, you probably felt like we were back on track, as we spoke about Jesus taking away the sting of death. And our Gospel at least indirectly mentions Mary when it talks about the womb that carried and the breasts that nursed Jesus.
But the first reading and psalm response have everything to do with Mary, at least in a spiritual sense. The literal meaning is that David had taken the Ark of the Covenant, which the Israelites had made on their sojourn to the Promised Land, and kept as they entered the Promised Land, even taking it into battle during the reign of some of the Judges. But it had really been left out of the newly developed kingdom that Saul ruled. So David brought it into his newly captured capital city of Jerusalem, and then has the priests and people offer worship to God. Eventually, that Ark would end up in the Temple that Solomon would build after the death of his father, King David.
What was in the Ark of the Covenant? There were three things that God commanded Moses put into the Ark: a golden pot with manna, Aaron’s staff that had budded, and the tablets of the Law. They were still in there as the Levites carried the Ark on their shoulders with poles into Jerusalem. But what does this have to do with Mary?
The early Christians understood Mary as the new Ark of the Covenant. Think about what (or better, whom) Mary carried with her: not the law written on stone tablets, but the author of the Law, who was God’s law made flesh; not the budding staff of the first high priest, but the Eternal High Priest Himself; not the manna which God had given the people in the wilderness, but the True Bread from Heaven, as we have heard over the past few weeks in the Gospel according to John.
And even the first reading is, in some sense, duplicated in the Gospel of the Visitation. Mary goes to visit Elizabeth, her cousin, who lives just outside of Jerusalem, in a village we now call Ein Kerem. The new ark is on the move, just as David had it brought to him. As David brings the Ark of the Covenant with him, he dances before it. John the Baptist, in the womb of Elizabeth, leaps for joy before Mary, the new Ark. Elizabeth says at the Visitation: “How is it that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” David says, after God promises to raise up a dynasty for him, “‘Whom am I, Lord God, and what is my house, that you should have brought me so far?’” So Mary has everything to do with our first reading and psalm, because she is the Ark of the New Covenant. In fact, when I was in Israel as a seminarian on pilgrimage, I remember visiting a church in Abu Ghosh called Our Lady of the Ark of the Covenant, and is said to have been built around the place where the Ark of the Covenant rested until King David took it to Jerusalem.
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| Statue of Mary at Our Lady of the Ark of the Covenant |
While Mary is the Ark of the New Covenant, par excellence, we, too, are invited to be arks of the new covenant. Yes, Mary is the New Ark because she carries Jesus, the new Law, the Eternal High Priest, and the Bread from Heaven within her, but we are called to hear the word of God, and carry it and observe it in our daily lives. In that way we become arks of the covenant. Mary both carries Jesus in her womb, but also hears the word of God and observes it, so she is doubly blessed, most blessed, in fact, among women and men.
So no, you weren’t hearing the wrong readings. David and the ark have everything to do with Mary. As we celebrate this Mass, we join David and the Blessed Virgin Mary in heaven, as heaven joins with earth in every Mass, and we sing and make music and worship God, uniting ourselves to Christ’s one perfect sacrifice, that truly took away the sins of the world, and instituted a new and everlasting covenant that is not only celebrated in Jerusalem on earth, but the Jerusalem that is above: heaven.
