Eternity Contracted to a Span

(Isaiah 7:10-14; Luke 1:26-38)

What we see here is God announcing his plan to do the impossible. In the first place, it’s physically impossible—Mary’s a virgin. She’s betrothed to Joseph—and just so we’re clear on this, betrothal is what they had back then in place of engagement, but it was much stronger; it entailed all the commitments of marriage with none of the benefits, and it lasted a whole year. So, she’s legally bound to Joseph, but they’re still living apart, probably with family making sure they don’t sneak off and do anything inappropriate. There’s absolutely no way she can be pregnant. But she’s going to be.

The physical impossibility, though, is secondary; it’s only to underscore the spiritual impossibility: this baby born to a virgin girl would be God. The angel doesn’t really push Mary to understand this fully, and she probably didn’t until much later; it was far too great an impossibility for anyone to comprehend at that point, and Mary was overwhelmed enough as it was. It’s all there, though.

In particular, note verse 35: the child will be called holy and the Son of God—why? Because he will be conceived, not by normal human action, but by a direct miraculous work of the Spirit of God. He will be fully human, but he will be more than merely human, right from the absolute beginning. He will be God become one fragile human being; the creator of the universe, the Word by whom the world was made, will take up nine months’ residence in a woman’s womb.

It’s a wonder, this; it’s a wonder we keep collapsing into sentiment and trite moral lessons because even now, even as many millions of times as the story has been told, it’s still too big for us to really grasp. The maker of all that is, the one who holds our incomprehensibly vast universe in the palm of his hand, as an unborn baby doing backflips and kicking his mother in the bladder; Almighty God with messy diapers and a rash. As the British poet John Betjeman asked in wonder,

And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

Yes, it is true, incomprehensibly, gloriously true: the infinite, all-powerful, all-glorious Son of God, the source of all life through whom all things were made, reduced himself to a zygote in the womb of a humble girl in a backwater village on the edge of civilization, to be born among the animals and laid in a feed trough by parents who were soon to be fugitives, to live as a homeless wanderer, to be falsely convicted and wrongly executed, to rise again from the dead—and he did it all for you, that you might know him, and know he loves you.