Mary’s objection to Gabriel is more right than she knows. “How will this be…?” means “This is not possible.” And it is not.
An announcement cannot make a virgin pregnant. Per Solomon’s prayer and Jesus’ own words to a Samaritan woman: God cannot be contained or embodied. James declares God cannot be tempted with evil. The Eternal cannot die, and the dead certainly do not live.
But Gabriel’s answer is more right than Mary’s objection. “For nothing will be impossible with God.”
A virgin conceived, the Word became flesh, and God lay as a baby in a manger. The Divine was tempted “in every respect” as we are, and though embodying holiness without sin, became sin. The Author of life died. Yet he lives.
Attempts to reconcile the contradictions of the Christ-event underestimate the impossibility of what God made not only possible, but actual. God confronts us with the absurd—hypostatic union, incarnation, resurrection—not so we will resolve it, but so it can dissolve our sin into grace, despair into hope, death into life, and our myopic control into the submitted faith expressed in Mary’s final response to Gabriel:
“Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”
This week, may we choose Mary’s latter way, and may the Lord be as absurd with us as he was with her.