What if Christ had never come? A rather counterfactual thought experiment, given the fact that He did. And yet Pierre Maury runs with this line for a moment in a Christmas sermon he gave in 1952 in his home country of France.
Thinking of our odd habit of making a distinction between the things we may have with Jesus Christ and in him, and the things we think we can think we can have without him, it occurred to me to imagine a world without Christmas, a world into which Jesus Christ had never and would never come, where we lived but had nothing with him. Imagine all the things we should have—and perhaps we should still have them all: all the things coveted by our greed, all the things which bring us remorse—everything.
Let each of us imagine his life, and the lives of others, the life of the world and its history, without the coming of Jesus Christ. That means, in the end of the day, without forgiveness; for ever irremediably guilty, bearing for ever the indelible mark of the evil we have done. It would be a life without the prayer of Jesus Christ; that is to say, one in which our prayer could not lean upon his, in which we could not say ‘I beseech thee, O God, in the name of Jesus Christ’; a life, therefore, lived in constant terror of God, because of unanswered prayer. It would be a life without God’s word—all those wonderful sayings which the Gospels report, so generous that even the complete unbeliever marvels at them: the words of the Sermon on the Mount, St Paul’s hymns to charity, the words of St John on love. Just imagine a life for ever walled up in the egoism of others and of ourselves; a life without the Cross. A life with no place on earth to flee to where we could be ashamed and not despair. Lastly, imagine what such a life would be like, whatever riches it might have contained, when the great poverty of death—one’s own and that of others—came to make all riches quite useless. Such a world, without Jesus Christ, would be just hell.[1]
Grievously, this counterfactual thought experiment isn’t counterfactual at all for the masses; those who travel on the highways and byways of the broad way, day in and out. The Christian, full of the living and risen and ascended hope of the living Christ, is surrounded by people who live in a world of self-possession, and the attending strife that produces. Maury is right, such a world, without Christ is in fact what hell is; the absence of God’s gracious intervention and disruption of such a world. This is the world that people inhabit all around who attempt to chop their life through the wane and woe of a Christless existence wherein all that is left in the end is the lonely incurved self.
Christ has sent us as His emissaries to the world, to let it, them know that the dissolving world they inhabit all their waning lives has been resurrected, re-created in the ground of all of reality, the Firstborn from the dead, Jesus Christ. They need to be told that ‘it is finished,’ and all they need to do now is acknowledge that Christ is indeed Lord and King. That when they look at the dusty family Bibles on their grandparents’ coffee tables, that in fact it represents a Holy ground place wherein within its pages, by the Spirit’s vivification, they might in fact encounter the face of God in Jesus Christ; and that He will be smiling at them, with open arms of eternal embrace. ‘Faith comes by hearing, hearing the Word of God.’
[1] Pierre Maury, Predestination and Other Papers (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1960), 99–100.