The Spirit of God

A popular Jewish translation from Hebrew into English for the first sentences of the Bible reads:

“Beginning when God created the heavens and the earth - the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the deep, a wind from God sweeping over the water, God said, ‘Let there be…’”

There is an interesting thing about the Hebrew word which gets translated as “wind” in the above citation. Transliterated from the original Hebrew it would read as “Ru-ach.” At different times in the Jewish scriptures this one word will get translated as wind, breath, or spirit. Sometimes the context in which the word finds mention lends greater credence to translating it one way or another. However, there are many instances where it is not at all clear which of the three words fits the context best. The opening sentences of Genesis could just as easily be making reference to the notion that it is God’s spirit which moved over the waters of creation; or, for that matter, there is no reason to suspect that understanding the breath of God as moving over those waters would be off the mark either. It would not surprise me in the least if a scholar steeped in Hebraic studies got asked if wind, breath or spirit is most appropriate in this context, the reply would be “Yes!” It is the combination of the three words which may well best complement the richer imagery embodied in this singular Hebraic iamge of the divine. Separating any one out would damage a potentially greater understanding of the unitive whole. (In like manner, we might well claim that within Christian contemplations, any talk of the Trinity which separates out any one of the masks of God, cannot but help to inflict irreparable damage to the great underlying tenet that God is One. But Trinitarian theology is a matter for another time.)

Etymological studies, which trace the evolution of words as they get transformed over the thresholds of time and translation, reveal that many languages similarly have developed associations with wind, breath, and spirit that are linguistically interchangeable. For instance, Greek - the other predominant biblical language, has one word, “pneuma” - think pneumonia for its association with breath in the lungs, which can and will get translated into English as wind, breath, or spirit. English, also, carries on this deep mingling of these conceptional images. Getting the wind knocked out of us is about losing our breath. The opposite of inspiration (inspiriting, if you will) is expiration (ex-spiriting). When we give up our breath we expire. While we could go on and on about all the historic linguistic associations these words have generated, let us, for now, return to the Creation story and delve into what biblical peoples meant and implied in attributing spirit and breath and the power of wind to God.

In order to most fully appreciate the biblical witness to God as spirit, breath, and/or wind, we are going to first insert one other biblical term into the mix to enhance the richer flavor of what we are to see and taste in these scriptural references.

Of all the things that are required for us to speak, to express ourselves in words - tongues, mouths, brains, an intellect, something to complain about, etc., there is, arguably, one particular thing which, if we took it away, cancels out the capacity of all these other things from generating speech: Breath. This is why the wind associated with God sweeping over the primal waters of creation could just as easily be understood as the breath of God sweeping over the primeval moisture of a mouth which is about to speak. Indeed, the first act after this exhalation is God speaking. “God said, ‘Let there be…’ And there was…”

Whenever the scripture makes reference to the word, spirit, breath, or wind of God, our attention is immediately drawn to God’s creative presence and activity. And what the ongoing narratives of scripture maintain is that the creative agency of God is not to be relegated to merely something which happened at the beginning. The biblical God is not some cosmic watchmaker who sets things in motion and then retreats into the ether having no more skin in the game. Rather, the scriptures bear witness to a Creator God who is perpetually engaged in continual creative activity. In fact, we might well understand God’s presence among us and in the world as about nothing else so much as newly recreating creation - and that includes, but is by no means limited to, recreating us.

Let us take a brief ramble through scripture to see how this image of God is one of those threads which helps to tie all of scripture together.

In one of the scriptural stories relating the creation of humankind, God is depicted as forming ‘adam (not a personal name at all but rather the Hebrew word for humankind) from out of the ‘adamah (a play-on-words here as ‘adamah is the Hebraic word for earth - just as the English word “human” derives from “humus” or soil). Immediately, a wind from God breathes life into the new creation which is identified as a being of spirit.

Later, with their backs to a large body of water awaiting slaughter at the hands of the Egyptian army, a small group of escaped slaves regret trusting Moses with having misled them with a promise of freedom. Moses, we are told, held out his arm over the sea prompting somehow a wind from God to drive back the waters and through those waters the children of Israel emerge as a new creation. Still later, the prophet Ezekiel is set down by the spirit of God into a valley filled with dry bones, without breath and so very dry. These dry bones are identified as the whole hopeless House of Israel. God speaks calling upon Ezekiel to call out to the four winds that they might breathe breath into them that they may live again. “I will put my breath into you,” God says - and the dry bones become newly created.

The Books of Isaiah bear witness to God, upon the Jewish return to their homeland following the dispiriting experience of their generations’ long exile in the Land of Babylon, actually creating a new heaven and a new earth in that day - a theme which is later picked up and echoed in the writings of Paul and the Revelation of John the Divine. The new heavens and the new earth envisioned by the Revelation is not about what happens at the end of time anymore than the creative activity of God envisioned by the writers of the Genesis story thought God ceased from creating after it all began. Rather, John was giving word to how God could be seen and understood and trusted to be continually engaged in creating new heavens and a new earth in the challenges of his own day - and thus in the challenges of our own day as well.

Lastly, for now, let us consider the deep paradoxical mystery of the new creation to which the writer of the Gospel of John bears witness. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was from God, and God was the Word. All things through the Word came to be…” So far, so good. This is little more than a paraphrase of what we read in Genesis. But, then…

“The Word became flesh and pitched a tent among us!”

Now this is a radically controversial challenge for the exercise of our faith in the creatively novel activity of God. The Word become flesh. The Word becoming One with a particular human being. The Word taking on human breath and breathing out upon us that spirit which like a wind, coming from God-knows-where and God-knows-hence, leaves behind some very palpable evidence that it did indeed blow threw here and uttered into existence a presence that brought into being a continually new creation.