Luke 1:37
What does Luke 1:37 mean?
For nothing spoken by God is impossible.”
The short answer
Luke 1:37 is the angel Gabriel's closing word to Mary: "nothing spoken by God is impossible." Mary has just asked how she, a virgin, could bear a son. Gabriel's answer points her to her elderly relative Elizabeth, pregnant against all expectation, and then states the principle behind it. When God speaks, the ordinary limits of biology, age, and circumstance do not have the final say.
The line is not new with Gabriel. It reaches back to Genesis 18:14, where God asks the laughing, elderly Sarah whether anything is too hard for the Lord, and it sounds again in Jeremiah's prayers. By the time it reaches Mary, it is a well-worn refrain of Israel's faith: God has a long track record of doing what people had written off. The early church kept singing it — Jesus himself tells his disciples that what is impossible for people is possible for God.
But the refrain has a sharp edge. In Gethsemane, Jesus prays that all things are possible for God, and asks that the cup of suffering pass from him. It does not. As Walter Brueggemann observes, the one thing that turns out not to be possible is that the obedient Son be spared suffering. So Luke 1:37 is not a blank check promising that God will remove every hardship from the faithful.
What is it, then? In Luke's Gospel, the promise underwrites something very specific: the reversals Mary sings about moments later. Rulers pulled down, the lowly lifted, the hungry filled, the rich sent away empty. "Nothing is impossible" is the guarantee that this upside-down vision is not wishful thinking. God's power is pledged to a purpose — overturning the world's hierarchies and keeping ancient promises — not to insulating believers from the cross.
What scholars say
These two scholars answer complementary questions: Walter Brueggemann traces where Gabriel's promise comes from — a refrain of God's impossibilities running from Sarah through Jeremiah to Gethsemane, where it meets its limit — while C. Clifton Black shows what the promise backs up in Luke itself: the Magnificat's concrete reversals, announced through shepherds and women rather than the powerful.
“There is no doubt that the celebration of YHWH's impossibilities, rooted in the question from Genesis 18:14 and exposited in the present prayer of Jeremiah, continues to sound in the faith of the early church in the New Testament: In Luke 1:37 at the beginning of the Jesus narrative, the angel, in anticipation of his birth, assures Mary that "nothing will be impossible with God." In Mark 10:27 when Peter and the disciples see the problem of "the rich young ruler," Jesus assures them, "For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible" (Mark 10:27). In Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane Jesus affirms that "For you all things are possible" (Mark 14:36). In the end, however, the one thing not possible is that an obedient Jesus should be rescued from suffering; in that suffering and death, faith reaches the edge of God's impossibility.”
“Shepherds, not foreign dignitaries, are first on the scene to welcome the newborn Messiah (2:20; cf. Matt 2:1–12). Meanwhile Joseph says nothing, and Zechariah is struck speechless for forty-two verses (Luke 1:22–63); but women, virginal and post-menopausal (1:18b, 27, 34), step into the spotlight to sing arias of bliss that dignify those of low estate (1:48), pull down sovereigns from their thrones while uplifting the humiliated (1:52), fill the hungry with delights and dismiss the rich with empty hands (1:53). Pie in the sky? “With God, nothing will be impossible” (1:37). So these verses spill over with relentless waves of happiness. Young and old, women and men, mortals and angels, bless and praise and give thanks to God (1:47, 64, 68; 2:13–14, 20, 28, 38).”
What it means for you
It is easy to read Luke 1:37 as a motivational slogan — proof that God will deliver whatever outcome we want. The verse promises something both harder and better. It asks whether you trust that God's spoken purposes will come to pass, even when your circumstances say otherwise, and even when the path runs through suffering rather than around it.
For a reader today, that might mean holding onto hope in a situation that looks closed, while letting go of the assumption that faith exempts you from difficulty. Mary's response is the model: not a demand for guarantees, but a willingness to let God's improbable word take shape in her own life.
Luke 1 in context
Luke 1 tells two intertwined announcement stories. Gabriel first appears to the priest Zechariah, promising a son — John the Baptist — to him and his aged wife Elizabeth; Zechariah doubts and is struck silent. Gabriel then comes to Mary, a young virgin in Nazareth, announcing that she will bear the Messiah. Verse 37 is his answer to her honest question of how this can be. Mary consents, visits Elizabeth, and breaks into the Magnificat — the song of reversal that this verse guarantees. The chapter ends with John's birth and Zechariah's own song of praise.