The Impossible Is God’s Opportunity
Marco Pozza - The archangel had told her, as a last acceleration considering her response, “Nothing is impossible to God, (Mary)” (Luke 1:37). The matter to which our archangel was referring was that concerning Elizabeth and Zechariah, relatives of the little Madonna: of the two of them, for physical reasons unknown to us—useless for the purposes of the matter—“everyone said barren.”
They were mocking them at the time when sterility was considered a curse, little sympathy from heaven, a kind of generational shame. The fact remains: Gabriel makes clear to Mary that morning in Nazareth that God really likes impossible challenges; they are the best chance to notice at once who runs away and who, instead, stays. It was then, squeezed between head and heart, that the future Madonna heard the invitation translated into childlike words, which she too could catch at the drop of a hat: “Do you, too, girl, feel like giving God's impossible a chance?”
Since “even Elizabeth, your relative, in her old age, has conceived a child, and this is the sixth month for her.” As in: know well that whatever you choose, every day, somewhere in the world, God will continue to do something that someone says is impossible. The fact is that for God, “doing the impossible is a kind of fun” (W. Disney). That is why Mary never visited Elizabeth, as so many who read the sacred lines of the Gospels think. Mary, faithful to the archangel, went to visit the impossible of God.
“She got up and went in haste”: since from the couch the whole world looks ugly, bad, and dishonest, she went to see for herself what God's impossible looked like. Hers was not the haste of those who do everything rushing and end up being blind kittens: it was just the mad desire to go and see who she might become after listening to the annunciation of the angel.
It was her most beautiful demonstration of absolute freedom before God. Every choice, she knows, is like a leap: it scares you, you put it off as long as you can, but if you jump, the leap becomes freedom. And the impossible of men becomes the opportunity of God: “whoever loves believes in the impossible” (E. Browning). According to some technical texts, even scientifically authoritative ones, the bumblebee cannot fly: it has a terrible ratio of shape, weight of its body, and wing area. The bumblebee, however, does not know this; so it keeps flying.
To the delight of those who love the impossible: “Blessed are you among women, blessed is the fruit of your womb,” Elizabeth, her pregnant cousin, exclaims to her. Without realizing, Elizabeth, that, in so rejoicing, she is inventing a whole piece of what will be the most eternal and broadest prayer the world will dedicate to her cousin, for centuries to come: the Hail Mary. The highest manifesto of femininity.
Mary will not be blessed for giving birth to the most beautiful of all children born to women. She will be so for that act of hers that made possible the birth of such a Son: because “she believed in the fulfillment of what the Lord had said to her” (cf. Lk. 1:39-45). And this, to the goodness of my soul, will remain the most significant difference between me and Our Lady. Not a difference of gender, male or female, nor a difference of origin or background. There remains a difference of position between me and her.
Me, to God: “First, I want to understand well this matter you ask: then I will decide whether to accept it or not.”
Mary, to God: “I try to love what you are asking so that one day I will be able to understand what is happening to me.”
God, meanwhile, outside the souls He is working in, leaves hanging a sign of the kind that makes human history: “Whoever thinks something is impossible, is requested not to disturb those who are trying to make it happen.”
It is a well-known thing that children are taught in school: some of the world's greatest feats were accomplished by people who were not smart enough to understand that those things were impossible. A good opportunity in life presents itself sooner or later: the problem is knowing how to recognize it. And seizing it. Like: a grapefruit is a lemon that had its wonderful chance, and took advantage of it.
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