Could Mary have declined the mission conferred upon her by God? Would that baby have filled her belly no matter how she felt about it? The Angel Gabriel doesn't ask for an answer; he only announces what will be. Her grace in accepting was amazing, if not essential.
And yet the angel did add a detail to settle her mind, which might have helped her get to that “yes.” “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 was John the Baptist's mother, and became pregnant with him long after she was “in the way of women,” and after a lifetime of infertility and all the stigma that included in her culture. Though she conceived in the “normal” way, the timing was miraculous enough to comfort Mary that her 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 is Covid-19 decimating populations and economies? If all things are possible with God, why do wildfires, hurricanes, tornados and earthquakes continue to wreak havoc? Yes, there is human agency in those examples – but if all things are possible with God, why don’t our prayers for healing always yield the results we want?
Those are good questions – and they lead only to 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 God if and how we are to be part of God's response. I certainly don’t know what to do about Covid and climate change but pray for conversion of hearts and change in behaviors. 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 – the fact 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 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 continued to overturn those laws in his 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 will see.
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