God’s Awesome Love

“How can this be?" Luke 1: 34

Sometimes a passage jumps out at you. you've read it many times before, but this time, it strikes a chord. In the first chapter of the Gospel of Saint Luke, I found this verse interesting, "I investigated accurately everything from the beginning..." (Luke 1:1-4)

I can imagine this writer amazed at what had occurred and desiring to come to the truth. He interviewed many of the disciples and people involved in this out-of-the-ordinary series of events. If Mary was still alive, St. Luke would have interviewed her to verify her story. What would he have found?

 A woman still amazed, still in awe at God's goodness? In spite of all she had gone through? The stigma of her virgin pregnancy, the flight to Egypt, knowing hundreds of babies were being slaughtered because of the search for her Son, and ultimately the horror of seeing her Son hanging on the cross, mutilated, seemingly defeated.

"How can this be?" she asked. How can this be that God chose me? How can this be that God would want to make me part of His plan to save humanity? How can this be that I would carry the mysteries of the universe in my womb? 

If we think about and realize God’s love for us, we will ask the same. How can this be that God loves us so much to make a plan so inconceivable as to give prophets a glimpse of it thousands of years before its fulfillment? How can this be that God sent His only begotten Son to die on the cross so if we believe in Him we can live forever with Him? It’s like if we gave our life for an insignificant paramecium but even more absurd because God is all powerful, and the idea is light years away from anything we could ever understand with our brains. 

Greg Boyle in his book, “Tattoos on the Heart”, wrote, “The desire of God’s heart is immeasurably larger than our imaginations can conjure.”