Hovering Spirit

When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light [Genesis 1:1-3, The Hebrew Bible, tr. by Robert Alter].

For those who follow the liturgical calendar, for the first Sunday after Epiphany, the focus is always on the Baptism of our Lord. This Sunday’s Gospel reading is Mark 1:4-11, the first recorded Gospel’s brief account of John’s baptism of Jesus in the Jordan. At first blush, the pairing of that Gospel text with the assigned OT reading [Genesis 1:1-5, RCL, Year B] may seem odd. Careful examination, however, shows several strong ties between the two texts.

An initial thought about the Genesis 1 Creation story: As has been noted by many OT scholars and students, the Bible’s first verse presents us with an interesting, difficult translation issue. While many traditional translations, including both the King James and the Revised Standard Versions, launch the Holy Text with the familiar “In the beginning God created heaven and earth,” newer translations, particularly those completed during the last forty years or so, argue that a better rendering of the Hebrew is “When God began to create the heavens and the earth, ….” [see Alter’s translation above].

Seen in that vein, the story becomes not so much about the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo [i.e., “creation out of nothing”], but rather creation out of a world that was, as Alter puts it, “welter and waste.” The original Hebrew, tohu va-vohu, is similarly alliterative (remember that I don’t do Hebrew).

To be sure, other biblical texts do support the creatio ex nihilo doctrine—my journal notes identify at least two: Hebrews 11:3 and Romans 1:20—but the initial chapter of Genesis, as translated by Alter and others, does not do so. In the Genesis 1 story, it is as if the world is formed from existing, albeit indiscriminate matter—Alter’s “welter and waste”—together with a sort of watery chasm that somehow existed beneath. And while the second verse of the KJV is certainly powerful and majestic, “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,” Robert Alter utilizes a beautiful metaphor drawn from the Hebrew text. He indicates that God’s breath (or Spirit) hovers over the waters [Genesis 1:2]. Alter points out that the same term is used elsewhere to describe the action of a mother eagle hovering or brooding over her young.

Instead of an eagle, Ephrem the Syrian, 4th century theologian and hymn writer, envisioned a brooding hen.

[The Holy Spirit] warmed the waters with a kind of vital warmth, even bringing them to a boil through intense heat in order to make them fertile. The action of a hen is similar. It sits on its eggs, making them fertile through the warmth of incubation [St. Ephrem’s Commentary on Genesis].

God’s creative action, though performed through God’s spoken word, does not end with that spoken word. God’s creative action continues. In that sense, God continues to create.

Later in his commentary, St. Ephrem sees the creative activity continue sacramentally through baptism. He allows:

Here, then, the Holy Spirit foreshadows the sacrament of holy baptism, prefiguring its arrival, so that the waters made fertile by the hovering of that same divine Spirit might give birth to the children of God [Id.].

Fertile waters, brought about by the brooding activity of God—in Mark’s Gospel lesson, the same Holy Spirit that hovers or broods over the ancient waters of Creation, the same Holy Spirit that makes all of Creation fertile with possibility, descends upon Jesus at the time of His baptism. Jesus, still wet from the waters of the Jordan, looks up and experiences a Genesis-like moment. He sees “the heavens torn apart and descending like a dove on him” [Mark 1:10]. He hears the heavenly Voice—the same Voice that through its Genesis word created swarms of living creatures, fish and sea monsters, and “every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind” [Genesis 1:20-21], continue its creative activity by saying, “You are my son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased [Mark 1:11, New International Version].

The same Holy Spirit, which broods over the ancient waters, which broods over Jesus at the time of His baptism, then does the unexpected. The Spirit drives the Beloved Son out into the wilderness, into a different type of welter and waste [see Mark 1:12]. Jesus will be met with challenges and temptations. And He will triumph.

And here is the unexpected, joyful surprise: the same Holy Spirit, whose brooding activity is always accompanied by endless possibilities, was equally present at your own baptism. At each of our baptisms, we were also named and called “beloved” by God. What is more, in a fashion that is unique to each of us, we were also called to live out our new water-anointed lives in the midst of God’s beloved Creation.

The life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ was sufficient to transform the sinful world from a status of welter and waste into a new Creation of promise, hope, and joy. He ascended to Heaven, but left with us an Advocate, a Paraclete [John 14:15]. As St. Ephrem so beautifully wrote more than sixteen hundred years ago, the hovering of the divine Spirit still gives birth to the children of God.