Hoping in the impossible (Josh Findlay)

We’re going to be looking at another advent story today, from Luke Chapter 1, verses 26-38. You’ve probably heard it before, you may have played a character in it on a school stage.
This is Gabriel’s visit to Mary to deliver a bit of news.

28 The angel[a] came to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you!”[b] 29 Startled by his statement, she tried to figure out what his greeting meant.

30 Then the angel told her, “Stop being afraid, Mary, because you have found favor with God. 31 Listen! You will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and you are to name him Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David. 33 He will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will never end.”

34 Mary asked the angel, “How can this happen, since I have not had relations with[c] a man?”

35 The angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come over you, and the power of the Most High will surround you. Therefore, the child will be holy and will be called the Son of God. 36 And listen! Elizabeth, your relative, has herself conceived a son in her old age, this woman who was rumored to be barren is in her sixth month.

I’ve titled this ‘Hoping in the Impossible’. These seem for me to be two of the big, standout issues in this text. This is a message of great hope. In terms of the story so far, everything that Israel has been waiting for, and everything that’s going to come, this is a pivotal message of hope in the Biblical story. But it’s bound up in the other explicit issue in the text, which is its impossibility. This is impossible. This is not possible. Mary knows it – it’s her first question, “how’s that gonna happen?” And these seem to me to both be worth contemplating together, for where we are at just now. So I want us to look at this passage and think about what it can tell us about finding hope, not just in an impossible claim, but in the face of impossible circumstances.

I’ll explain what I mean. I think off the bat we need to remind ourselves of what the Israelites were waiting for and hoping for. To know why this was such good news, we need to remember that they were waiting for the promised King who would right the wrongs of Israel’s past, liberate them from their subjugation and persecution to foreign powers, and be hope for all people. In the next chapter, Chapter Two, we meet a righteous man called Simeon and a prophet called Anna, and they speak as just two of the people who have been waiting for this news, and believe that Jesus is this transforming salvation.

So imagine all those people, generation after generation, living in exile, in persecution, and dying in that state, and trying to hold on to the belief that there would be a deliverance for their people from those circumstances, even if they didn’t get to see it themselves. Well, if any of them had faith as small as mine, or even close to that, then it’s pretty easy to imagine that they might have felt, from time to time, or constantly, that the salvation from oppression they were waiting for might never come. That’s the first seeming impossibility. Surely we will never be delivered from the tyranny of empire. So when a message comes that says I can move the immovable object, the message contains something impossible. I would suggest that this is a pairing we always must find. If the thing you long to see changed seems immovable, any message that claims to be able to move it will also sound impossible.

For us just now, the future is looking very bleak indeed, to me at least, and I suspect to many of you. For a whole host of reasons, the 21st Century is currently on a trajectory that is horribly alarming. And salvation from what people are currently enduring, and what looms large in our future, might understandably look impossible. Indeed, the more one engages with the realities of climate breakdown, technological advances, uncontrollable capitalism, nuclear weapons, and the myriad injustices that play out within that chaos (not to mention a grim virus causing its own havoc), the more impossible it seems that the world can be saved for the devastating path it’s on.

To speak of salvation from these things is pretty in keeping with the kind of salvation the people of Israel were longing for. Other people probably won’t feel like this. They’ll feel more optimistic, and expectant, seeing opportunities everywhere. And that’s wonderful, but as we go through, I think those people will be challenged by different bits, as we engage with different aspects of what it means to hope in something in a really serious way.

So I suggest that there are some things in this passage, I have four brief points, about how we must find hope in the face of an impossible set of problems, and therefore must forge hope in impossible events.

1. Realism! There is nothing gained by pretending that the abnormal is normal, that pain isn’t felt, that the path isn’t dangerous, that things don’t look bad, or that impossible claims are anything other than that. Mary’s first reaction to Gabriel’s message is to be as realistic and rationally enquiring as any normal person would be. How can this be, it’s not possible? Mary’s reaction is to acknowledge the reality of the world she lives in. I think this is really important. If faith and hope and spirituality are based on such a transcendence of the material world that we don’t recognise the reality of the material world, then I think we end up ignoring stuff that should not be ignored, and means perhaps that we don’t take people’s real world problems seriously. Jesus says that with God the impossible is possible, he doesn’t say that the extraordinary is ordinary. So we don’t need to treat it as such. When we hope we need to ask Mary’s question: “How can this be?” Implicit in that question is a realism about present circumstances and future hurdles.

2. God will do the impossible! Mary isn’t being asked to do anything impossible. I want to take this as a point of relief. Stuff is going to be expected of us, I’m going to get to that. But I just want us to bask in the relief of knowing that God is not asking us to do anything impossible. Mary will bear and raise a child, there are a few people in our church that know something of what that involves. I hear there are some challenging bits to that, but it’s not impossible. In Gabriel’s message, he relays that God will do something impossible. This can be a message of relief, but it’s also where our hope lies. Our hope lies in God using the possible – challenging, but possible – things that we can do, and achieving something we cannot do on our own. A big part of biblical hope is about waiting on the Lord. To trust in this, is to trust that our acts of submission and service will not echo in an empty chamber and fade away, but will combine with a resounding hope and love and justice and glory. So that’s our second point, everything we are being asked to do is possible.

3.  Hopeful stories. Gabriel encourages Mary by giving an example of something seemingly impossible happening, that has relevance and significance to what she is being asked to hope for. “Even your relative Elizabeth has also conceived a son in her old age; and she who was called barren is now in her sixth month. For nothing will be impossible with God.” What function does this have in the passage? A lot of faith talk can be kind of impatient and very clinical. God’s promised it, so believe! Yet in addition to the message proclaiming what God is going to do, Gabriel is filling Mary’s mind with a story that helps her to believe that things she doesn’t see every day are possible in God. Why do we love testimonies? Because what is better at encouraging hope and expectation within us more than hearing examples of what we long for in the future having happened in the past. Mary’s first thought is about the limitations of human bodies. Gabriel encourages her with a story of God’s provisions exceeding expectations of the limitations of human bodies.

For us, realism about the destructive practices of our own lives is important. The limitations, the norms, the threat. We have to heed that. But then, part of living as a people committed to life and hope in the midst of that reality, is to engage with testimonies, histories and ways of life that speak of a healthier, more just, redeemed way of life that we are not seeing ourselves in the world around us for much of our day to day. To know that what is impossible by the standards of the world we inhabit has been shown to be possible by the lives of others. This has always been common practice for the Jewish people. Even while living in exile, they would celebrate the feasts, like Passover, remembering God’s deliverance of the people from slavery in Egypt, hoping for the day when they would once again be delivered from persecution. 

As human beings, we are not that rational. Not as much as we might like. What we think about, believe in, hope for, imagine to be possible all relates to the sights and sounds that fill our every day. This is part of what we were contemplating as a Church during the series on the Common Rule, about shaping our habits to cultivate fuller lives. Well cultivating hope within us, in a time like this, is about surrounding ourselves with stories of hope. I’m interested in anthropology, the study of human beings, their societies and behaviours, and I find that to be a wonderful antidote to the cynicism that dominates our ideas that the destructive and harmful ways we organise our societies and economies are the only ways that people ever could. So what can help you? Remembering answered prayers for you or others, testimonies, whatever it might be. And how can you intentionally and habitually fill your environment with such hope.

So we’ve had 1. Being realistic about the situation. 2. Knowing that we are not being asked to do anything impossible. That’s God’s job. 3 That we should be encouraged by hopeful stories like the one we long to unfold.

4. The final point is the hardest - our submission. When the Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann discusses the impossible, he refers to passages saying that all things are possible with God. But Brueggemann says that this accomplishment of the impossible, in the Jesus narrative, comes with what he calls the “cruciform caveat”. He writes:

When Jesus prayed in the garden before he was arrested by the authorities, he prays for deliverance from his coming suffering for his obedience:

My father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want (Matthew 26:39).

Even in his prayer for deliverance, however, Jesus is prepared to be fully obedient. As it turns out for Jesus, he cannot avoid his “cup of suffering.”…That was not possible for him. It was an impossibility that could not be overcome. And so he suffered to death. This is the one impossibility that could not be made possible. It is not possible for Jesus (or his disciples) to live a new life in contradiction to the old world without paying a deep price. Even in its hope, the gospel is deeply honest about the matter!

I mentioned Simeon earlier. After Gabriel’s visit to Mary, when they present Jesus at the temple, Simeon is filled with hope. He tells Mary that Jesus is going to shake up the world – he says “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel” – but he also tells Mary that “a sword will pierce your own soul too”. Mary rejoices in the opportunity to be part of God’s plan, and its only later that somebody else tells her how much this is going to hurt. Gabriel’s message is filled with the joy and hope and honour and favour. But Simeon says “this is also going to hurt”.

I think the impossible often seems impossible because we treat pain as if it is the highest reality. And any great transformation I think is based upon people believing in a higher reality than pain. That some things are worth the pain. But even more, transformation depends on such sacrifice and such cost being borne with no normal guarantee that what you are sacrificing for will come to fruition. And that is when we need to hold on to the hope and the promises of God and ultimate justice; of transformation to a world that is good. To believe in the resurrection is to believe that life conquers death. That pain and death are not the final word but birth life and freedom. Believing in the resurrection should make it easier for us to live with a willingness to bear the costs of pain and loss and risk and death because we believe that they are the price for justice to overcome oppression, because we believe that from this is born life and freedom. But our sacrifice, and submission, is not accomplishing the impossible – we need to leave the rest up to God, and in the same way, we need to leave the rest up to other people. To trust in other people. And I think that’s the other struggle we have when it comes to sacrificing stuff – the lack of an explicit guarantee that others will do what they need to, to make your sacrifice worth it.

The things we think are impossible are often based on what we think other people won’t do. “I could do my part, I would personally be willing to bear the cost, but I don’t believe that other people will do what they need to do to make this happen”. Submission to God seems to be a decision for me to do my part, without knowing that others will do theirs and without having control to make that happen. I say this not because I’m doing it, but because I think it’s the example we’re set in Jesus, and because what I see of social transformations are based on the same practice of people saying, “I’m going to bear this cost in hope that in time and together the impossible will be rendered possible”. And I guess that one of the fears we have is that we’ll sacrifice ourselves and nothing will come of it. “I would sacrifice”, I tell myself, “if I actually thought it would amount to something. But it won’t. I’ll throw myself in, no one will show up to do their part, and I will end up humiliated, hurt, punished or dead”.

In Romans Chapter 5 verse 8, Paul writes that “God proves his love for us in this: While we were still sinners” (while we were far off, still failing, still not doing our part, still not committing ourselves to God’s work on earth) “Christ died for us”. This submission to the ultimate sacrifice was made before everyone else that is involved in this plan was ready to show up. Jesus said that being his disciple, being part of his mission, means taking up your cross and following him. For Jesus, it’s not a case of: “Well I don’t need them, I’m doing it all alone anyway.” His mission is a collective, expanding one that those who follow him will partake in. Jesus’ cross was the victory. We’re still part of a battle – just look out your window. But Jesus submits to the vision of God’s Kingdom coming and his enthronement coming in this horrific way, trusting that while he does his part, a people would follow. The impossible can happen, but we must submit, and act, and suffer before the impossible hope is realised.

I realise this doesn’t sound very festive. I plan on having a nice Christmas with my family. But I think this story has more to offer than the comfort of a winter festival. It has a far bigger picture of hope and transformation. Different people will struggle with different bits of this. Some people find it easy to hope, but without acknowledging the problem and therefore without knowing the actions needed. Others can be realistic but without hope, creating a defeatism that also doesn’t lead to the actions needed. Others can be realistic and hopeful but without the strength or courage to do what’s needed.

In times like these, we have to increase the scope and scale of what we can hope for and live out. This is a story about hoping in the impossible. And so I hope and pray it would encourage us to do just that.

Josh Findlay

You can watch Josh’s youtube videos summarising the book Romans Disarmed here.