“And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.”
Elizabeth, John the Baptist's mother, became pregnant with him long after she was “in the way of women,” and after a lifetime of infertility and its stigma. Though her conception was “normal," the timing was miraculous enough to comfort Mary that the angel's strange message truly came from God.
We need to be reminded that there are no limits to what God can do, because we spend so much time in the realm of limits. And because we see so many situations in which we yearn to see the unlimited power of God break out… and it doesn’t seem to. If all things are possible with God, why are benefits to the poor and vulnerable being gutted? If all things are possible with God, why did 26 sweet children and their teachers die five years ago at Sandy Hook, and an average 33 more killed with guns daily in America? If God can do all things, why don’t we always see the healing we yearn for?
Those are all good questions – and they lead nowhere but to a diminished faith. We are invited to believe in infinite possibilities despite the limits we perceive. We are invited to pray to the God for whom all things are possible… and then to ask how we are to be part of God's response.
I certainly don’t know what to do about Congress but pray for profound conversion of heart for those who pass unjust laws. I do know that gun violence can be reduced through sensible laws as well as culture change, and that I can be part of that solution. And praying for healing within the overall confines of life and death means accepting that the outcomes of our prayers exist on that continuum as well. That isn’t meant to sound facile; that our prayers are not always answered in the way we desire doesn’t mean they aren’t sometimes answered that way. And that each of those “sometimes” is an occasion to strengthen our faith.
What “impossibility” are you facing right now? Are you willing to invite God to work with it, turn it over, squish and mold it like clay, bend it like time and perhaps reveal a deeper mystery of “yes” in it? Are you willing to have your boundaries of the possible stretched? Pray in that today. Ask God to show you where God has placed limits, and where you’re just assuming they exist.
The story of Jesus’ incarnation through Mary of Nazareth is beautiful in so many ways, not the least for how decisively God overturns the “laws” of nature to bring about the overturning of death and sin and disease and injustice, ending the enslavement of this world to darkness. All that happens because Mary joined in the mission of God in the way she could, in the way she was asked. Jesus would continue to overturn those laws in his adult ministry. And, of course, on Easter morning, the God of the impossible demonstrated once again just how infinite his power is.
Nothing is impossible with God. The more we believe it, the further our boundaries of “possibility” will be stretched, and the deeper we will join in God's mission of restoration. And the deeper we go, the more impossible things we see.
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