Fourth Sunday of Advent 2014 - Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons

Fra Angelico

Thinking about the account of the Annunciation which forms this Sundays’ Gospel, my mind kept returning to those simple words, ‘Nothing will be impossible for God’. I suppose if I had a robust faith I’d be able to rest easy with that sentence, but it puzzles me, for all through history, prayer and intercession has been made to the Most High in situations where some sign of intervention might have changed things, times of horror and war, the cries of the abandoned in prison camps. Where, one asks, was the Most High in all this? Was this humanly impossible situation a point where the possibility of God should have been real?

I cannot answer that, for like you, I do not possess insight into the mind of God, but I sense that in Luke’s account of the annunciation, if we strip away from it layers of sentimental piety, we glimpse some understanding of how God acts with us.

I suspect the key is not to demand heroic dramatic gestures from God, like some cosmic action film where the goodies defeat the baddies. Instead the clues of Jesus about the presence of God refer us back to the minutiae of life, the little things that matter.

I’m not knocking those moments of encounter where the ‘Glory’ of God is known, but they seem to me to be few and far between, the true’ glory’ or advent of God is something that comes upon us gently, like the dawn from on high!

Back to the Annunciation, it is a series of gambles, the Angel’s message,, direct and unequivocal, ‘The Lord is with you’, Mary, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and you shall conceive and bear a son ! God uses the most natural of acts, generation and birth as the possible way of becoming one of us.

But it depends on people, a young woman, betrothed but not yet married, a virgin for whom the impossible situation looms ! Acceptance means trouble ahead, big trouble, divorce, abandonment, let’s not forget death! Then there is Elizabeth, old, barren for years, that too is an impossible situation, is she too old for a child?

So what do we have? Just God putting the initiative into our hands, letting us be the seed for growth, the potential for life, for goodness, for hope! And suddenly I see, that ‘nothing that is impossible’, for it is all about the vastness of Love itself, of the greatest gift of all!