Why is Mary the first tabernacle?
In every Mass, as in the Last Supper, through the Eucharistic Prayer, the mystery of transubstantiation takes place. This occurs when the priest says the words of the Consecration.
“Our Lord chose to remain in the Eucharist to strengthen us in our struggle, to nourish us (anyone who works has to eat to replace the energy they use up), to set us on fire with his Love and make us his apostles: to divinize us!"
This same Christ present on the altar started to exist as man by being born of a woman. “When the Divine Child was conceived, Mary’s humanity gave him hands and feet, eyes and ears, and a body with which to suffer. Just as the petals of a rose after a dew close on the dew as if to absorb its energies, so too, Mary as the Mystical Rose closed upon him whom the Old Testament had described as a dew descending upon the earth.” For nine months, he was cloistered in the virginal womb of Mary; and she passed into him everything that human nature demands for its growth.
The God whom earth and sea and sky
Adore and laud and magnify,
Whose might they own, whose praise they tell,
In Mary’s body deigned to dwell.
O Mother blest! the chosen shrine
Wherein the Architect divine,
Whose hand contains the earth and sky,
Vouchsafed in hidden guise to lie:
Blest in the message Gabriel brought;
Blest in the work the Spirit wrought;
Most blest, to bring to human birth
The long desired of all the earth.
Since the flesh and bones of Mary were not different from those of Jesus, how can the royal dignity of the Son be denied to the Mother? When David was planning the Temple of Jerusalem on a scale of magnificence becoming a God, he said, “This palace is not for man but for Yahweh God.”
How much more reasonable, then, that God adorns Mary with all precious gifts so that she may be a worthy dwelling of his Son: the first tabernacle of Jesus Christ, God and Man.
When finally, she did give him birth, it was as if a great ciborium had opened, and she was holding in her hands the Guest who was also the Host of the world, as if to say, “Behold, this is the lamb of God; behold, this is he who takes away the sins of the world.”
Mary is the creature closest to Jesus. “The piety of the Christian people has always very rightly sensed a profound link between devotion to the Blessed Virgin and worship of the Eucharist. Mary guides the faithful to the Eucharist.” She teaches us how to deal with her Son when we receive him in Holy Communion.
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