Moreover, it's a time for us to reflect on the Holy Spirit. Most of what we say and believe about our Christian faith is about God the Father and Jesus Christ. We don't often address our prayers to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit doesn't appear often in our hymns.
The compilers of our lectionary chose this passage for the first reading on Trinity Sunday.
Wisdom was created by God and was present with God as the earth and all its components were created. I looked back at Genesis 1 because of the similarities to that telling about creation:
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters....A footnote explains that the word translated as "wind" is ruakh ("air" in Hebrew) may also be translated as "wind" or "breath" and that the KJV and RSV translated it as "spirit."
Since I grew up on the RSV and certainly was influenced as well by the KJV, I still think "spirit," particularly on Trinity Sunday, but I'm willing to consider wisdom.
So, I turned again as I often do to Preaching the Old Testament by Ronald J. Allen & Clark M. Williamson:
"The Wisdom literature assumes that the world itself reveals the character and purposes of God. The idea that Woman Wisdom was an agent of creation is one way of explaining how the divine intentions become implanted in the world: wisdom put them there. Now, people can discover God's design for the good life by paying attention to what we learn from life itself."Samuel Terrien, in his The Elusive Presence asserts that the figure of the beautiful woman hidden among the angels in Michelangelo's Sistine chapel fresco of the creation of man is Wisdom although in a footnote he admits that other commentors see her as Eve.
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