Roman Reflections II: the Ark of the New Covenant

As we approach the awful and yet wonderful Triduum, we recollect the first Eucharist and the Lord proclaiming the New Covenant in His blood. The next day He bleeds on the Cross, and dies, His lifeblood spent.

Catholic Piety places Our Lady cradling the dead Christ in her arms. No doubt His blood smears upon her as she struggles with His limp, lifeless frame. The Litany of Loreto gives one of Our Lady's epithets as "the Ark of the Covenant" and I think that Paul's epistle to the Romans gives us a glimpse of why.

In the twenty-fifth verse of the third chapter, the Lord is described as being the hilasterion. The word does indeed mean the "propitiation" of our sins, but it also refers to the lid, the mercy seat, of the Ark of the Covenant on which the blood of a sacrifice was dripped after being sacrificed on the altar.

Clearly this word hilasterion points us towards the sacrifice of the Mass, in which the Lord's New Covenant in His blood poured for us upon the Ark of His mother after the sacrifice upon Christ as altar. In this horrible scene of a devastated mother holding the body of her son, which only thirty years early she cradled as a baby, do we see this propitiation effected.

Whether or not you believe Our Lady to be Immaculately Conceived, her example is very clear to us. If we are truly going to be justified in the eyes of God then we must allow ourselves to have His lifeblood poured out upon us which effects our reconciliation. In so doing, our hearts will be broken in order to be a part of His life, just as Our Lady's heart was pierced by the lances of men in the body of Our Lord. She is part of His life, and now she has her position as Queen of Heaven.