Is anything too wonderful for God? (Advent #5)

Luke 1:26-38

In my last post a few days ago I commented on the strange paradox that we see often in our society today: that we are surrounded by wonders yet so often fail to believe in the wondrous aspects of the Bible. There is, perhaps, an explanation for this: though we do not understand much of what surrounds us - the physics required, say, to allow a plane to fly off into the clouds, seemingly defying all laws of gravity; or the software programming used to make iBooks with translucent pages that we can turn with our fingers - we trust that somehow "science" has made each of these wonders possible. We couldn't do them ourselves, we reason, but we just don't have the know-how. Someone else does. But parting the Red Sea? That's impossible. A virgin giving birth to a baby? No-one can do that.

Which means, essentially, that we have elevated science to the true, marvellous miracle-worker of our age, but demoted God to the role of a fairly subservient heavenly janitor; all He can do is move around and tidy up what is already there, as if the laws of physics, which He created, are somehow too powerful for Him to overrule. Many have already commented wisely on the way in which the "miracles" of technology that happen daily have numbed us to the wonder of it all, one article from Christianity Today and the YouTube clip it references both expressing this phenomenon particularly well. The attendant effect that I often barely notice in my own life is that, though we expect great and marvellous deeds daily from our iPads, we expect nothing of an almighty God.

In a time well before iPads were even conceivable (even books with words printed on them and bound together were still a good millennium and a half away), a young girl was faced with something that still defies modern science and is therefore dismissed as nonsense: she was told that, despite being a virgin, she would have a child. On asking how this was possible, she was given a response that, to modern scientific readers, might sound like nonsense:

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

Not really a scientific explanation, but what could possibly be lacking from it? I do not ever feel the need to understand the mechanics of how exactly it is that I can tap away at a few black keys and hit a few buttons and suddenly become a globally published author. I just know I can, because I trust that my computer and those who have programmed it and the thing we call the Internet knew what they were doing when they set up the whole system in which I now can simply luxuriate. Likewise for Mary. How can a virgin give birth? To a human constrained by the law that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, it seems more or less impossible. To a God who made everything out of nothing - creation ex nihilo, the theologians call it - it is surely no harder than what He has already done, no harder for Him to manage than any of what we take utterly for granted in our everyday lives.

I don't question the reality of what my computer can do, simply because it is beyond my understanding. I see the proof of it daily. So too, Mary, whose virgin body would soon begin to show all the signs of being with child, would surely have known before too long that the impossible had happened. For nothing is impossible with God.