When the angel Gabriel visits Mary to announce Christ’s birth, his final words are “For with God nothing shall be impossible” (Luke 1:37 KJV). This proclamation resonates with Genesis 18:14, where the Lord asks Abraham, “Is any thing too hard for the Lord?” These two verses also resonate with a time later in Luke, when Jesus tells his disciples, “The things which are impossible with men are possible with God” (18:27).
These three similar statements provoke three different reactions. Two of the respondents tell the speaker something that the speaker already knows. Peter, with perhaps a hint of pride, points out that they have left everything to follow Jesus (18:28). Sarah replies to the Lord in Genesis 18:15 by denying that she had laughed (which is itself laughable!). But Mary’s reaction is the most indelible. Mary makes way to Gabriel’s words, saying, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; let it be unto me according to thy word” (2:38).
Mary’s response itself seems impossible to me – how does a person say that? The impossibility of this whole situation intensified over time, ultimately revealing that the High God of Heaven would become fully and uniquely incarnate in an ordinary human life. This indeed sounds impossible. To the Greeks, it was foolishness, and to the Hebrews, it was scandalous.
Familiarity has domesticated the statements of Gabriel and Jesus about what God can do, but to the original audience, these statements were shocking, even provoking violence. Some sense of the shock of the incarnation can be recovered by reading sources from the first few centuries, where people were still wrestling with the angel’s words. One of these is a second-century apocryphal text called “The Protoevangelium of James.” This text mostly follows Luke’s account until it’s time for Mary to give birth. At this point, Joseph is out searching for a midwife, not knowing that Mary will give birth easily without one. At the moment of the birth, Joseph sees time stand still:
I, Joseph, was walking and yet I was not walking. I lifted my gaze toward the vault of heaven and saw it standing still; then at the air and I saw it seized with dread; and the birds of the heaven, motionless.… Then I looked upon the flow of the river and I saw kid-goats with their mouths posed over the water, but they did not drink. Then all things, in one instant, were being driven on again by their own impetus (Prot. Jas. 18).1
At the moment in which the infinite, perfect God steps down from heaven into mortal flesh, Joseph sees a brief “glitch in the matrix.” Gary A. Anderson writes, “The restless advance of this world is momentarily put on hold to mark the intrusion of God into space and time.”2 Someone greater than the greatest prophet has arrived, and time makes way for God.
In this story, the universe pauses at the point when Jesus “made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Phil. 2:7-8). Time made way for God when God Himself made way for us. He yielded to our bodily limitations, like a king taking the place of his servant, stepping lower so we could step higher. He literally made himself a way to salvation by pouring himself out.
God’s contraction into a finite space and limited time required an unknowable cost. This spiritual pouring out is translated to us in terms we can understand, and one of these is the physical pouring out of light during the Nativity. This is part of the meaning of the glorious light shining around the angels (Luke 2:9), the light poured out by the Magi’s star, and a great light shining at Jesus’s birth in the Protoevangelium of James.
The medieval artist Geertgen tot Sint Jans’s painted a glowing baby Jesus pouring out light, illuminating Mary and the onlookers in Nativity at Night. Each face is lit up like those of the worshipers in a candlelit service singing “Silent Night.” This aura is a glowing, natural light, uncontrollably diffusing into the uncomprehending darkness, given face-to-face.
Consider the candle held by a worshiper. The flame requires an earthly cost, as the solid candlewax is consumed, transformed by oxygen into two vapors, CO2 and H2O. These pour out at great volume into the air – if you hold a burning candle in the light from the projector, these billows cast broad shadows, which are several times wider than the flame itself. It pours out much more than we can see. And notice that H2O – water! — is poured out by a flame. Most people think of water as the opposite of a flame, but to a chemist, water is the flame’s direct product.
Each singer in that service is pouring out breath, and that is doing what the candles are doing. Electrons weave through mitochondrial membranes to accomplish the same combustion reaction, in a much more controlled manner than in the candle, but producing the same two vapors. The singers have another level of control over this reaction of pouring out. They are able to join their voices and direct their breath to heaven in worship.
The light continues to pour out in newly written music. John Rutter was inspired by Geertgen’s Nativity at Night to write “Candlelight Carol,” one of the greatest twentieth-century Christmas songs.3 Rutter wrote music that sounds like it glows with the light Geertgen painted, invoking “candle light, angel light, firelight, and star-glow” to “shine on his cradle till breaking of dawn.” That outer physical light is matched and exceeded by the inner spiritual light of God’s grace shining through the words and music joined into one work of art.
God pours out promises to his people, giving impossible life. To the extent that each of us makes way for that life, it becomes manifested, more than we can ask or think. Each act of pouring out and giving way to God’s purposes is an echo of the singular event of the Incarnation — when God became man by pouring Himself out and refusing to grasp what was rightfully his.
Each day gives a thousand chances to make way as Mary did, or like Peter did, or like Sarah did. Each response was enough. Even if all we take are toddling baby steps, he rejoices over us as a father over his son – because his son is, in fact, born in us. This is the mystery we celebrate on Christmas Day, the impossibility we participate in with breath and word poured out, from Gabriel, to Mary, to Luke, to our eyes and ears.
Footnotes
- Quoted by Gary A. Anderson, That I May Dwell Among Them: Incarnation and Atonement in the Tabernacle Narrative. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2023, 48-49.
- Anderson, That I May Dwell Among Them, 49.
- John Rutter, “Candlelight Carol. SATBB Vocal Score (John Rutter Anniversary ed.).” Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
