And the angel said to her, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the

Most High will overshadow you.

Therefore the child to be born will be called Holy, the Son of God.

If we were to think about Old Testament imagery in this passage, we might first think

about how in Exodus we hear about the cloud that abode upon the meeting

tent and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.

Mike Gabriel's words allude to that mysterious cloud associated with the Holy Spirit,

the descent of which accompanies the Lord's presence in

his tabernacle. We might also think of the opening lines of Genesis. The Spirit of God

was moving over the face of the waters, and the spirit of life that God breathed into

the clay of Adam.

Indeed, one might rightly wonder whether Gabriel's message makes reference to all three persons of the Trinity.

The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.

Does not St. Paul tell us that the sun is the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Does not St. Paul tell us that the Son is the power of God,

and is not the Father the Most High?

These sorts of references to the persons of the Holy Trinity, of course,

were not lost on St. Thomas Aquinas,

who regards the conception of Christ not only as a Christological mystery, but as a Trinitarian one as well, where the Holy Spirit's action

is at center stage. Unfortunately, Aquinas' account of the Holy Spirit's place in Christology

is seriously

underappreciated, even by some sympathetic Thomists, which leads to a common critique that one

sometimes hears that Aquinas doesn't say enough about the Holy Spirit.

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