23 December 2025
"And the Holy Spirit":
The Divine Presence in the new Ark of the Covenant
By Stefan Kaminski
The Nativity of God the Son in human flesh is, perhaps at first, not the most obvious time to reflect on God the Holy Spirit. Nonetheless, our reflections on Nicea have neatly brought us to the last phrase of the Nicene statement to coincide with this Christmas moment. So, reflect we must!
Nicea’s statement, however, is rather brief when it comes to the third Person of the Trinity. It simply says that we believe “in the Holy Spirit.” The further detail from the familiar Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed that we recite on Sundays and Solemnities at Mass was explicated at the Council of Constantinople in 384 AD (those still alive in another 59 years’ time can perhaps look for further reflections then. I don’t expect to be at the CHC at that point in time).
So we are left with little direction from Nicea, other than professing the Holy Spirit’s existence.
However, the image of a heavily-pregnant Mary, accompanied by her husband, Joseph, is hopefully not far from our minds as we approach Christmas. And intrinsic to that imagery is our knowledge of the particular circumstances of their betrothal. Joseph accepted Mary as his wife after she was mysteriously visited by the Archangel Gabriel, who announced to her that she would bear the Son of God, Emmanuel, and that she would conceive a child as a result of the Holy Spirit coming upon her and the power of the Most High ‘overshadowing’ her (cf. Luke 1:35). Matthew likewise, if more concisely, makes the straightforward historical assertion that Mary “was found with child through the Holy Spirit” (Mt 1:18).
These Gospel texts, directly or indirectly dependent as they are on eyewitnesses (starting with Mary herself), express fully and without prevarication the simple truth proclaimed by the first Christian communities, from which emerged the Gospel texts themselves as well as the oral traditions which found expression in the creeds and definitions of the Councils. This truth consists of an extraordinary and unimaginable (by human standards) form of divine intervention, in which the Holy Spirt is intimately involved.
It is interesting to see the few other instances in Scripture where a very particular intervention or manifestation of God is recorded with this idea of ‘overshadowing’, as Luke describes it. In the Old Testament, the term is used to describe the cloud that hung over the Israelite’s Tent of Meeting as they travelled through the desert. Within the tent was placed the Ark of the Covenant, containing the stones upon which God Himself had inscribed the precepts of Israel’s relationship with Him. When the cloud covered the tent “the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle”, and such was the physicality of God’s presence that “Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting” (Exodus 40:34-35). The same term is used at Jesus’ Transfiguration on the mountain when “a bright cloud overshadowed them” and the voice of the Father is heard saying, “This is my beloved Son…” (Matthew 17:1-8).
However, the image of a heavily-pregnant Mary, accompanied by her husband, Joseph, is hopefully not far from our minds as we approach Christmas. And intrinsic to that imagery is our knowledge of the particular circumstances of their betrothal. Joseph accepted Mary as his wife after she was mysteriously visited by the Archangel Gabriel, who announced to her that she would bear the Son of God, Emmanuel, and that she would conceive a child as a result of the Holy Spirit coming upon her and the power of the Most High ‘overshadowing’ her (cf. Luke 1:35). Matthew likewise, if more concisely, makes the straightforward historical assertion that Mary “was found with child through the Holy Spirit” (Mt 1:18).
These Gospel texts, directly or indirectly dependent as they are on eyewitnesses (starting with Mary herself), express fully and without prevarication the simple truth proclaimed by the first Christian communities, from which emerged the Gospel texts themselves as well as the oral traditions which found expression in the creeds and definitions of the Councils. This truth consists of an extraordinary and unimaginable (by human standards) form of divine intervention, in which the Holy Spirt is intimately involved.
This use of ‘overshadowing’ thus finds a very specific, and parallel, connotation literally at the heart of the two Testaments. In the Old, the Ark of the Covenant within the Holy of Holies is the fullest and foundational experience of God’s Presence amongst His Chosen People. In the New, the term accompanies the Son as God-amongst-us by the will and authority of the Father: on the mountain, the Father confirms the Son – the One who has taken flesh from the Virgin Mary – as His own. With this parallel in mind, we can more easily understand the Catechism when it says, “Mary, in whom the Lord himself has just made his dwelling, is the daughter of Zion in person, the Ark of the Covenant, the place where the glory of the Lord dwells. She is ‘the dwelling of God . . . with men’” (CCC 2676).
In this parallel lies also the great distinction between the two modes of God’s Presence. The first, whilst physically real, remains very much the presence of a Being who is Other, Transcendent. The second is the insertion of God’s Divinity into humanity, in order that we might become divine (captured in the priest’s prayer during Mass at the mingling of the water with wine: By the mystery of this water in wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity).
The Holy Spirit is He who brings about this second and very Personal manifestation of God: Jesus is conceived in Mary’s womb in a purely miraculous manner, yet whilst following the logic of human generation. In this case, however, Mary has offered her body and soul to God Himself; and God, in the Person of the Holy Spirit, who is the Love of the Father and the Son, has reciprocated by acting inside of her to bring about the new dwelling place of the Lord Jesus.
To conclude, we can perhaps say that the Holy Spirit is He who generates in human flesh the will of the Father. This is why we understand Him as the Person who animates the Church, Christ’s Bride, firstly at Pentecost, then in continuation through the sacramental ministry of priests, as well as in the gifts, inspirations and graces He offers to every baptised person.
If Christmas invites us to adore the Christ-Child, it thereby also invites us to meditate on Mary as the perfect image of one for whom great things have been done by the Mighty and Holy God (cf. the Magnificat, Luke 1:49).