COMMENTARY.
The immediate meaning of the building of the Tabernacle. The Ark of the Covenant, in which were kept the two tables of the law, was more costly than anything else in the Tabernacle. By it the Israelites were to be constantly reminded of the covenant made with God as to the strict observance of the Commandments. The Manna, which was also deposited in the Ark, was to remind them of God’s loving guidance and preservation of them, and move them to love and trust Him. As cherubim kept guard over Paradise, so they now watched over the Ark of the Covenant; and, at the same time, they reminded the people that they should worship God, and serve Him as willingly as do the angels in heaven. The golden candlestick with its lights always burning was an emblem of faith in the true God, and admonished the Israelites to live according to that faith, to avoid the works of darkness, and walk in God’s presence. The laver and the strict laws regarding ablutions were to remind the priests that they ought to approach the holy service of God with clean hearts. The never-ceasing smoke, ascending from the altar of incense, bade the people to lift up their hearts to God, and send up constant prayers, like incense, to heaven. The loaves of the proposition were a perpetual exhortation to be grateful to God, from whom come all good gifts for our souls as well as our bodies. The curtain, which shut off the Holy of Holies, and through which even the High Priest dared pass only once a year, signified “that the way into the holies was not yet made manifest” (Hebr. 9, 8). As God was present in the pillar of cloud, resting on the Ark, so the Tabernacle was God’s dwelling in the midst of His people.
Its typical meaning. “The Tabernacle is a parable of the time present” (i. e. the Christian era), writes St. Paul. It foreshadowed the Church of the New Testament and its houses of God. As there was only one Tabernacle and one divine worship instituted by God Himself, so there is only one Church and one true worship of Christ in the world instituted by Himself. In every Catholic church or chapel you will find the same divine worship regulated by one supreme authority, the Vicar of Christ. The different rites (Latin, Greek, Coptic, Syrian, Slavonic &c.) differ only in accidentals and are one even in their difference, because approved by one and the same authority. As there was a real but mysterious and hidden presence of God in the Tabernacle (in the cloud over the ark), so there is the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar. He is both the cloud and the living bread (Manna) that has come down from heaven to give life to the world.
As there was an altar of holocausts and bloody sacrifices and an altar of shew-breads, so there is in the New Testament one and the same altar ever representing the bloody sacrifice of the cross and ever
