"If I had not come..."
Submitted by Dawn Blem
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“If I had not come…”
That’s
the way Jesus began one of His sentences. TheHaunting
suggestiveness of it is overpowering. The smug Complacency
with which I have come to take Christmas for
Granted is
suddenly seized and shattered. Gone in a trice, a Million
cheery lights and merry laughs.
Suppose Christ
had not come. Suppose there had Been…
No manger
birth
No star
in the east
No
angel rhapsody
No
awe-struck shepherds
No
Sermon on the Mount
No
Healer of hurts and hearts
No
reconciling Cross
No
empty tomb
No empowering Spirit
No community of the caring…
If Jesus had
not come, our thinking about God would have gone along
gropingly, forever faltering, forever fractured. For is it
not Jesus who, practically as well as conceptually,
Invests God
with love, the universe with meaning, and life with
immeasurably glorious possibilities?
If Jesus had
not come! What mind can compass the Immensity of the gap,
the vastness of the void, that would Have been created in
the human story?
History
without its fairest Figure
Literature without its sublimest passages
Eloquence without its loftiest flights
Theology without its Christology
Serventhood for others without its model and Motive
The
world without a Redeemer
Death without a Destroyer
Heaven without assurance or allure…
Ah! But I
remember another word of His…“I am come!” My word, what a
difference!
He has come…
To Mary’s
encircling arms
To the
shepherds wondering gaze
To
Jerusalem’s pools and pathways
To the
classy rich and cashless poor
To
the arrogant, the ignorant, the errant
To
the resolute, the dissolute, the prostitute.
There has
never been a coming like it. (Yes, there will be another,
but even it will not be like this one.)
More
than an effort, it was an effect.
More than an attempt, it was an act.
More than a desire, it was a deed.
To reveal to suffer, to die, to live again.
To enlighten our darkness,
To
liberate us from our Chains,
To save us from ourselves,
To
bring us to God and to Mankind and to heaven.
That’s why He came! That’s why He is here!
Paul Rees
See "The Three Lessons of God" by Leo Tolstoy, in "What Men
Live By"
December Quote of Month
