“If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin.” (John 15:22) What strange words are these! Especially the part where Jesus says, “If I had not come...” What would it be like, I wonder, if Christ had not come? Would it really make that much difference? Are we right in dating all human history from the birth of Christ, so that everything that has happened before He came is called “B.C.” (before Christ) and everything that has happened since then is called “A.D.” (Anno Domini - “the year of our Lord?”) Parenthetically, we might note the irony in the fact that even those who deny Christ must date their denials from His birth! Is this all some sort of gigantic mistake, or does the birth of Christ in our world really make that much difference?
It didn’t seem to make much difference at the time. Not a single historian of the period so much as mentioned it. Yes, a few of ancient historians, namely Pliny (ca. A.D. 111-115), Tacitus (A.D. 116), and Suetonius (A.D. 120) made brief reference to Christ, and Flavius Josephus made a note of his death, but hardly anyone took notice of His birth. (Josephus, the Jewish turncoat who defected to the Romans, wrote his book “The Antiquities of the Jews” for the benefit of Roman readers, and his remarks were later expanded by Christian editors. He makes passing reference to the crucifixion of Jesus, and says, “those who had loved him at first did not cease to do so. And the tribe of Christians so named for him are not extinct to this day.”)
So we must ask the difficult question: Does it really make much difference that a man named Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians call the Christ, (the “Messiah”), was born two millennia ago? Would it matter much to you and me if Jesus had never come? These are the questions that come to mind as we ponder those strange words in the Fourth gospel: “If I had not come...” What would it be like if Jesus had never been born in Bethlehem of Judea, if Christ had never come and visited this planet?
Let us exercise our imaginations a bit, and pretend that Jesus never came. Let us pretend that the entire Christmas story is a hoax. Let us imagine that some archaeologist, digging around in the caves near the Dead Sea where the famous “Dead Sea Scrolls” were found, suddenly came upon an ancient earthenware jar containing a scroll, dated in the reign of Caesar Augustus. Let us pretend that ancient scroll told a strange story about how a scribe one day, when he had nothing better to do, dreamed up the whole story of Jesus of Nazareth, and thereby invented the Christian religion. Let us pretend that such a scroll is found, authenticated, and released to the world. What might happen?
We can imagine how the terrible news would spread like wildfire, for bad news always travels fast. For once, the terrible wars of our world would be relegated to the back pages, and newspapers, television and radio would be full of the story: “Christianity is a hoax! Christ never came!” What would happen? We can imagine that councils of churches and church-sponsored relief agencies would begin to close their doors; the Pope in Rome would be out of a job, and soon all Christian churches around the world would be closed, their doors nailed shut, and clergy would be forbidden to conduct religious services in the name of a Christ who never came. Rapidly, human freedoms would be curtailed. We remember that respect for human personality is one of the cornerstones of the Gospel, but this soon falls by the wayside as totalitarian groups of the Left and the Right move into power, now that Christ, their greatest Enemy, is safely out of the way.
Let us imagine further that the church in which we worship week after week is boarded up. A sign over the door says, “No trespassing, by order of the State.” Vandals throw rocks through the stained-glass windows and the sanctuary is soon reduced to a shambles. Let us imagine that all of this has happened. The churches are closed and nailed shut, because Christ never came. Imagine what life would be like if Christ had not come. Imagine that, from force of habit, a few of us return from time to time to the church, and silently slip in by a side entrance. The church is now a sad and lonely place, but it still holds some beautiful memories for us. What wonderful things were done and said within these hallowed walls! Our children were baptized, our marriage vows spoken, loved ones laid to rest, our hopes were buoyed up here, in the church, by the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But all this is in the past. Now, all that we have left are the memories of days long gone by.
A young couple bring their child to be baptized. They want to give their child the best possible start in life. They want to surround their child with something more than their limited human love: the love of the Christian community, and especially, the love of God. With much regret we must tell them that we are now forbidden to baptize anymore. Besides, what sense does it make to baptize anyone in the Name of One who never lived, One who never came? Sorrowfully, they turn and walk away. How desperately they want someone to share the joy of this new life with them! For a moment I am tempted to quote to them the words of Jesus: “Let the little children come to me...” but what’s the use, if Christ never came?
The couple are hardly out the door, when a sad-faced gentleman comes in. He asks if I would be willing to conduct a funeral service for his beloved wife who has just passed away. I have to tell him that I am sorry, but I am now forbidden to preside over funeral services in the name of a Christ who never lived, and died, and rose again. Besides, if Christ never came, what right do any of us have to think that God cares about our sorrow, or that there is any hope for us beyond the grave? St. Paul faced this horrific prospect head-on centuries ago, and wrote to the Church at Corinth: “...if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” (I Corinthians 15:15-19)
Noticing that the sad-faced gentleman is about to break under his load of grief and sorrow, I instinctively begin to quote to Him the comforting words of Jesus: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” (John 14:1-3) But I stop short. All of this is absurd and foolish, if Christ never came. Regretfully, I tell him that the secular government will now provide free funerals, without the religious trimmings, for those who need them.
As the sad-faced man leaves, a young woman comes into the church. She has wasted her young life in sin and selfishness, but now life has caught up with her, and she is tortured by guilt and remorse. Seeing her look of utter despair, I instinctively want to quote to her the words of Jesus: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” (Matt. 11:28) But what’s the use, if Christ never came?
Suddenly there is the sound of heavy boots thumping through the aisles of the church. The police have discovered our secret entrance, and are dispersing the crowd which has gathered in the church. “Move along, there! Can’t you read? The sign outside says NO TRESPASSING! This church is closed!” Sadly, I turn to go home. Even though it is Advent, the period just prior to Christmas, there is no sound of Christmas carols in the air, no gaiety, no giving and receiving of gifts, no visiting of family and friends, no church services and no pageants and parties to plan for. We used to complain about being so frazzled due to the “Christmas rush;” now, we’d give anything for just a bit of that busy-ness. Things have certainly changed since the discovery that Christ never came!
We used to talk about “freedom under God,” and we believed that every human being was sacred in the sight of God. We believed this because “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son” to save that world. But now the state is everything and the individual is nothing. Our own nation, once a democracy, has now become a totalitarian state. Though far from being the “Christian nation” we professed to be, Christ had made some significant inroads into our American life. While we did not always practice all that we professed, we had been deeply influenced by the Christian notion that every human being is of sacred worth in the sight of God. We believed that people had certain inalienable rights: among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, our country had even proclaimed the shocking notion that the individual’s first loyalty was to God, and that a person might even be a “conscientious objector” to a policy of the state. But all of this has gone by the wayside, since we learned that Christ never came. Ministers used to have free pulpits, where they felt free to denounce evil and corruption wherever they saw it, even in government, without fear or favor. But now all of that has changed. If Christ has not come, then the state is free to take over our consciences; then Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Karl Marx are right: people exist only to serve the state. They are not persons of supreme worth because they are people for whom Christ died, they are but things to be used at the discretion of whoever is in power. The Golden Rule has become replaced by the Rule of Gold: “Those who have the gold, make the rules.” Power is everything, and persons are nothing, if Christ never came.
But now our imaginations fail us. We simply cannot conceive of the horror of living in a world where Christ has not come. And yet, we do not really have to use our imaginations to describe such a world, do we? We have had and still have concrete evidence of what life is like without the presence of Christ. For instance, think of what the world was like when Jesus was born in Bethlehem during the reign of Caesar Augustus. Despite Socrates and Plato and the fabled Pax Romana, it was a world where nine-tenths of the people grubbed and fought and lived in abject poverty in order that the remaining one-tenth might live in luxurious indulgence. Human life was cheap, and slavery was universally practiced. The historian Gibbon writes of one mansion in Rome that required 400 slaves. Another Roman owned 20,000 slaves. At the Palace of Caesar Augustus, a slave was caught in the pantry eating part of a quail left over from dinner. He was promptly executed by crucifixion as an example to others. Even slaves who had kindlier masters lived and died without rights, families, or possessions. Yes, I know that Christians have often defended the practice of slavery, and have even used the Bible to justify that horrible practice; but most Christians today agree that such a use of the Bible is improper, and that Christ came into the world to set people free. Some recent church conventions have even apologized to African-Americans for their condoning of slavery for so many years in times past.
And think of the status of women before Christ came. They were considered as property, not as persons. They had no rights, and could be divorced literally at the snap of a finger. Plato even wondered whether women had a soul. Then the Son of God came into the world, born of woman, cradled in a woman’s arms, and gathered about Himself disciples—some of whom were women—and forever gave womanhood a new status and dignity. We have not always remembered this fact, and Christians have sometimes done some very unchristian things in their treatment of women, but Christ’s own example still stands as a reminder of God’s standard for us. St. Paul, in spite of all of his own inbred male chauvinism, got it right when he wrote, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28)
As for little children, you get an idea of how they were valued when you read of King Herod’s terrible act in ordering the slaughter of all male children under two years of age, trying to get at the infant Christ whose birth threatened his position on the throne. Under Roman law, children had no rights. At birth, parents could decide whether or not they wished to keep a newborn child, abandon it, or strangle it. Every year thousands of unwanted babies were fished out of Roman sewers. And Plato and Aristotle, for all of their lofty philosophy, approved of the practice! What a jolt, then, when Jesus took up a little child in His arms and proclaimed, “Of such is the kingdom of heaven!” Before Jesus came, unwanted or crippled children were thrown to the wolves. Christians over the centuries have built hospitals and homes to care for them. Every Christmas, the old familiar story makes glad the hearts of children, because they instinctively know that He came for them.
At one time the aged were stripped of their clothes and turned out into the cold winter to die as a means of getting rid of them. Today, we care for the aged in multitudes of homes, many of them sponsored by the church or church institutions. No doubt we could and should do more, but it is to be doubted whether we would have even done this much were it not for the fact that Christ came, and put an infinite price on the head of every human being. Throughout the whole world the Red Cross is a symbol of our concern for others. Where did we get that concern? The same place we got the cross: from Christ, who said that God cares infinitely for the least, the last, and the lost.
Before Christ came, people speculated about the nature of God. Many believed that if, indeed, God did exist, He must be (as Woody Allen says) an “under-achiever.” God seemed to be distant and aloof from the world; too far removed from the world to care very much about the fate of humankind. Then there came into the world One who was called “Immanuel,” i.e., “God with us...” One who taught us to think of God in the very personal term : “Abba, Father.” And that has made all of the difference in the world.
No, we do not need to use our imaginations to describe what the world would be like without Christ. We have ample evidence from the pages of history as to what life was like before His coming; and our examples do not have to be all drawn from past history. Even in our own day we have examples. All we need do is to think for awhile about Hitler’s Germany with its concentration camps, Stalin’s Soviet Union with its gulags, and other societies in our modern world where life is cheap, and most people live in tragedy and desperation. Never mind that sometimes these societies call themselves “Christian”; they still fall short of the abundant life which Christ promised. Not everyone who calls Jesus Lord lives under the Lordship of Jesus. I am afraid that there are still many examples in our world of what it would be like to live in a world where Christ never came. Some may even think that such a world would be an improvement; but on balance, I believe that they are wrong. In a provocative recent novel titled “A Skeleton in God’s Closet,” Paul Maier, professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University, has one of his characters proclaim his belief that Christ’s coming has had nothing but a negative impact on the world. The critic says, “Look to the past... What’s Church history but the unholy saga of oppression and wars over the faith: Christians from Venice looting Christians in Constantinople; the Spanish Inquisition burning heretics and Jews; Catholic armies versus Lutheran armies in the 1500s, drenching the countryside in blood; French Protestants getting massacred; witch trials from Joan of Arc to Salem, Massachusetts; and thousands of other grisly events in history.”
The hero of the book responds by saying, “...it’s unfair to blame the Church for the violence on this planet. History would have been much bloodier if there had been no Christianity. It was Christians who insisted on truce days in the Middle Ages, built hospitals to care for the wounded, intervened in quarrels to keep the peace, erected orphanages, shelters for the homeless... You’ve forgotten all about the Church’s single-handedly keeping Western culture alive during the Dark Ages, civilizing the barbarian invaders of Rome, recopying manuscripts in monastery libraries so that we’d even have such things as books written before Gutenberg... Have you forgotten that Christianity is the alma mater of Western civilization, the nourishing mother’ that built the schools and invented the university? That its record, after all, is far more positive than you seem to recall? Christianity lay behind many of the greatest accomplishments in the last two thousand years, ranging from basilicas and cathedrals in architecture, to Leonardo and Michelangelo in art, to Johann Sebastian Bach in music. The Church has fostered some of the greatest minds ever to enlighten our world—Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Luther, Shakespeare, Milton, Newton....” (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1994, pp. 312-313)
“If Christ had not come...” that is the subject we are considering, and we have spent some time speculating about what life might be like if He had not come. But, thank God, He did come, and His coming forever split the world in two: B.C. and A.D. Christians believe that lowly birth in a stable in Bethlehem was really the most important event in human history. The earliest Christian preaching (which we find in the Book of Acts) throbs with one triumphant theme: “The Scriptures have been fulfilled! The promised Messiah has come! God has visited and redeemed His people!” Sometimes we find people who want to discard the Hebrew Bible, what is usually called the “Old Testament,” but it appears in the Christian Bible because it is part of the Christ-event. It points toward a fulfillment. But by itself, the Hebrew Bible is something of an unfinished symphony. Its difficult questions remain unanswered, its hopes unfulfilled, until an angel’s song is heard in the land: “Do not be afraid; for see I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” (Luke 2:10-11)
Christ has come to us. The real question remaining now is: Have we come to Him? Are we really and truly living B.C. or A.D.? Perhaps you may think that my description of a world without Christ is fanciful, and yet I have observed that there are many people in our world...some of them even in the church...who live as though Christ never came. Years ago Halford Luccock wrote of the legendary Rip Van Winkle who slept for twenty years, and thus missed the American Revolution. Upon awakening everything had changed. The sign over his favorite pub no longer bore the image of George III, but rather of George the First—George Washington, the first president of the United States. When Rip returned to his village after his long sleep he didn’t recognize anybody, and nobody recognized him. He could not find his house or his family. The soldiers wore different uniforms, and were serving under a different flag. Rip wandered around in a daze, wondering if he had been transported into a new kind of a world. Which, of course, is exactly what had happened! During his twenty year’s sleep a revolution had taken place, but he was still living on the wrong side of that revolution. That image is provocative for us, for I have a hunch that a good many professing Christians are still living on the wrong side of the revolution that Christ brought to our world.
Christmas celebrates the anniversary of a revolution. After Christ lived and died and lived again, the world has never been quite the same. It may look the same on the surface, but a power has been let loose in the world which will ultimately conquer the world. The coming of Christ has bisected human history and radically changed the situation of humanity on this planet. No longer need anyone grope in darkness for the meaning of human existence. In Christ we know what God is like and what we were meant to be like. Unfortunately, some people haven’t yet caught up with the news. They are still living B.C. rather than A.D. They do not seem to realize that a revolution has taken place. They tend to mouth the old prejudices, and live out the old practices which were appropriate for a world B.C., but not for a world A.D. In her book “Absolute Truths,” the last in a series of six novels about life in the Church of England in this century, British writer Susan Howatch relates a sharp disagreement between two clergymen of the Anglican Church who have become enemies and spew out their venom toward one another in front of their spiritual director, Father Jon Darrow. The priest listens for a while, and then, exasperated, turns his back on them and walks away saying, “I have but one comment to make on your behavior and that’s this: it all seems a very long way from Jesus of Nazareth.” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995: p.385) A lot of statements made on social issues by professing Christians these days seem to this preacher to be “a very long way from Jesus of Nazareth.” Most of us live as though Christ had not come. There are millions of nominal Christians of whom it can be said that almost nothing in their attitudes, their prejudices, or their behavior shows much evidence that Christ has come. Martin Buber once asked “If Messiah has come, where are Messiah’s people?” And Nietzche is reported to have said that we Christians are going to have to look a lot more redeemed if he was expected to believe in our Redeemer! He had a point, and his words come too close to most of us for comfort!
To give a concrete example: How often, when folks are discussing moral issues such as one’s attitude toward capital punishment, Christians say, “The Bible says An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth!’ “Of course, it does say that, at least in Exodus 21:23-24 and Lev. 24:19-20, and the notion here is of proportional revenge. As such, it was a great improvement over the older concept of total revenge. But Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” (Matt 5:38-39) From what I read in the debate on capital punishment as well as other moral issues of our day, a great many Christians have not yet heard the words of their Lord. They often blithely mimic the attitudes of the world around them, and see no contradiction whatever between their professed faith in Christ and their willingness to totally ignore Him and what He said on any given subject.
“If Christ had not come...” but He has come, and that coming ought to make a profound difference for all of us. Because of Christ, we now know that none of us have to go it alone, but that there is One who walks beside us on the roadway of life; indeed, One who said that He Himself was the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and walking in that Way we may find life abundant and eternal.
In one of his science-fiction stories author Ray Bradbury describes a scene in Independence, Missouri, sometime in the not too distant future. The setting is much like that of a hundred and fifty years ago, except that the pioneers , instead of heading west, are preparing to go into outer space, and covered wagons have been replaced by rocket ships. A young woman, with much trembling of heart and nerve, is making ready to go to Mars in order to marry her fianc who is already there. Before she leaves, in order to reassure herself that she is doing the right thing, she calls him on a space telephone. His reply is completely blotted out by electrical interference, except for one word - “LOVE.” But on the strength of having heard that one clear word from space, she leaps into the unknown and begins the interplanetary journey.
I would suggest that her situation is analogous to our own. In spite of all the questions that are still unanswered about the meaning of our human existence upon planet earth, we have heard one clear word from space, and that word is love. The question is: are we willing to launch out and live in the light of that word?
Our Lord said something about the fact that because He has come into the world, people no longer have any excuse for their sin. In other words,
• Why continue to walk in darkness, now that Light has come?
• Why should we continue to live lovelessly, when Love has come?
• Why should we continue to live Godlessly, when God has come?
In Christ, God has come into the world. The big question is: what difference has that coming made to you? As a medieval poet put it, “Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born, if He is not born in thee, thy soul is all forlorn.” (Angelus Silesius 1624-1677) Amen.