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Nothing Will Be Impossible with God
“Mary said to the angel, ‘How can this be, since I am a virgin?’ 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 holy; he will be called Son of God. 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.’"
Luke 1:34-37
As the holy night of Christmas Eve approaches, this passage from Luke’s Gospel is appointed for today’s Morning Prayer. Mary asks the angel a good question about the child to be born: “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” In human experience, this kind of thing simply does not happen. We know where babies come from. They come from us, and we are something of a mess, and we pass along to the next generation some measure of the mess we inherited from our own parents.
As that sad and sour poet Philip Larkin described the human condition:
They mess you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
It’s simply impossible, Larkin thinks, to improve the mess of the human condition. Larkin never married or had children, and I read him in this poem as a kind of Ebenezer Scrooge, saying a bitter “Bah, humbug!” to life itself.
Yet, Gabriel responds to Mary’s question by telling her that the impossible is precisely what our God does. As Robert Farrar Capon wrote, Jesus did not “come to teach the teachable, improve the improvable, or reform the reformable.” No, Jesus came to raise the dead.
Another poet, W.H. Auden, understood not only what Larkin described, but also God’s mighty act of salvation:
We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.
Yes, a miracle is precisely what we need. And in the birth of Jesus, a miracle is what we have. In this precious child, we are given a pure and good heart, a full and holy human life, that even the worst we could do could not undo. Unlike Larkin, we Christians can pass along the gift of life from one generation to the next and joyfully celebrate tomorrow with our children and families. Because of the birth of this child, we can all be born again, begin again, be made new. Our families can be filled afresh with love, hope, peace, and joy, for with our God, nothing will be impossible.
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