12/7/52

Scripture: John 15: 15-27

Text: John 15: 22. “If I had not come and spoken unto them....”

Have you ever tried to think what existence in our world might be like if Jesus had never come to the peoples of the earth?

Of course, people had existed before the birth of Christ. Some of them developed a considerable ethical sense and a great awareness of God. The Hebrews had their Moses and the ten commandments. The Greeks had their democracy (for the privileged -- not for their slaves.) The Romans had their imperial courts, their armies, and the luxury that is built on domination.

But there is a peculiar glow to life which we take for granted, because of its familiarity, but which was not found by people, generally, before He came. Nor is it found now among folk who do not know Him.

At the end of his earthly ministry, Jesus was saying many things to his close disciples -- summarizing the spirit of all they had been taught of him, encouraging them, fortifying them for the testing that would come so soon.

He gathered a dozen of them together in a room, up the stairs, where they could be alone with him for a while. A pre-Passover supper there was the last meal they ever ate all together. They were aware of a gathering storm of some kind, but Jesus knew it was really upon them, that his hour of crisis and translation had arrived, and with it their hour of testing.

As if everything depended on them, Jesus summarized the substance of his thought. He washed their feet in an act reserved to servants alone, as a reminder to them that both he and they were ordained of God to serve their fellowmen. He tried to make them see that love and undiscourageable good will are expressions of the life of God in people. He had said, “I dedicate myself for their sakes.”

Later, that same evening, possibly still in that upper room, perhaps on the way to the garden of Gethsemene, He likened himself to the root and stem of a vine, and his disciples to the branches of that vine.

He himself used the expression, “If I had not come,” and spoke as if people would, without him, have gone right on in their erroneous and evil ways, without ever having known of it as wrong.

It is both a joyous thing, and a solemn experience, to meet Christ. For if one has really met Him, one can never be the same “former self” again. For one thing, measured against that matchless life and perfect spirit, we are aware of our own inadequacy and sin as never before. And from then on we have not the excuse of ignorance for our sin.

Jesus gives us a revelation of what life can rise to be. He acquaints us with the helps accessible to us in Him. And the old, self-sufficient standards become woefully inadequate. If we shrink from the high adventures to which He summons us, returning to the same old trough from which we greedily ate before, our failure is worse than before He came into our life.

To meet Christ is a blessed hope; but also a fearsome thing. We may be vastly the better for it; and we may, if we deliberately turn our back upon Him, be far the worse for it. All Christ’s grace can not spare us from the decision as to what we are going to do with a life that has once been illuminated by His presence.

But what kind of world might we know if Christ had never come to the earth? Try to imagine, for a time, what it would be like. Does it matter greatly to us that stars led wise men to a manger, cradling a newborn babe? Was the first Christmas really a “watershed” in history?

It did not seem so urgently significant to the secular historians of the time. Josephus noted the death of Jesus in a sentence. But who mentioned his birth, until the gospel writers got around to writing down the story? Apparently no one else preserved the news in history.

It takes an unpleasant imagination to think what the earth would be like without Jesus Christ. For so much of what we are, and think, and expect, involves Him in our life.

Suppose some archaeologist was able to prove beyond all doubt that Jesus never lived; that some sinister “Judas character” had foisted the story off on people for a cruel joke; that the gospels were clever forgeries.

Skeptics would chorus, “I told you so.” Cruel men could drive for power with no inhibition except the drive of others just as cruel and determined. The faith of the fathers could just disintegrate. Church doors might be nailed shut till other uses could be found for the premises.

Those slipping in for a short time by some alley door to the unheated study of an occasional minister who was slow in letting go of the gospel would have to de dealt with in the light of the new disillusionment. Anyone bringing a baby for baptism would have to be told that it was useless -- worse than useless -- in the light of our past error; that God did not love little children as a Father, and it was no use getting sentimental about the matter. What use would there be in dedicating a child to a God who cared not in the least?

Those bereft of their loved ones would be refused Christian burial; for there would be no such nonsense; no proffered hope of immortal life. Probably the government would be forbidding anyone to preside over a burial service in the name of a Savior who had never lived. If a widow’s husband were dead, he would just be dead. Perhaps the government would bury his body, or otherwise dispose of it without any fuss nor much notice.

People would burn their Bibles and all the books that mentioned the name of Christ. Possibly, the police might assist in hurrying up the process by arranging for big public bon fires on the square. Libraries would be in shambles with all poetry, fiction, history, the classics of Shakespeare, Dickens, Milton and others gone. There might be some scientific treatises left; perhaps a few modern novels that not many would care to read.

Probably the state would become everything, and the person nothing, except a cog in the machinery of the State. The freedom we have had, with Jesus Christ the final standard of our acts and attitudes would be a thing of the erroneous past. Gone the day when you or I could denounce corruption anywhere; could challenge policies of the administration, as the “loyal opposition,” in the name of God. No one would be ordained, to speak the truth in the name of Christ, to point to the evils of the social order, to proclaim a standard of Christian right in loyalty to a Savior.

Perhaps you could paint a blacker picture in your imagination. If you were to dream a dream that Jesus had never come to earth, you might have a different nightmare. But none of us would know the same world, or life we have tasted continuously, if Christ had not come to this earth.

Waking from such a dream, would not one turn on the light to be sure it was not real, perhaps go to see if the children were all right in their beds, and pray that they would never know life without Christ. For is it not plain that, if Jesus had not come, there would never have been the sense of sacredness of life which we have known in Christ?

In our time we have seen how cheap is life when men of power have deliberately turned their back on Christ. It has been clear all the way from Buchenwald to the slave camps of Siberia. Purges are not wrong in Russia; they are right. No Christian flag nor Christian conscience flies above the hammer and sickle as it does with and over the Stars and Stripes.

Story after story comes out with the occasional escapee from behind the “iron curtain,” like that of a Czeckoslovackian woman who came recently to Chicago after spending 3 years in the uranium mines in Soviet territory. She told reporters that men and women died by the hundreds. Nobody cared. No one cared when she fell ill and nearly died. If she died, some other unfortunate would take her place. More dead than really alive, she somehow escaped to freedom in the West, where people seemed still to care.

Despite all our wrongness in the Western world, it seems that we are still sensitive to human hurts and sufferings. The message of the Master: “Inasmuch as you do it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, you do it unto me” is ploughed into our souls. [Matthew 25: 40]. “Inasmuch as you do it not” rests upon our conscience, leaving us no peace until we do. [Matthew 25: 45].

In parable after parable we are reminded that we are to love one another, because God is love, and loves each of us. In Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan, the tale of the lost sheep, the account of the return of the Prodigal son, we find our significance as persons anchored in the love of God that will not let us go.

Before the Master, came, unwanted children were left to the wolves. Now we build hospitals to care for crippled children and keep victims of polio alive in iron lungs.

Before Christ, men died in the mines of Egypt and Babylon and no one tried to same them. Christ came, and now men risk their lives to save the lives of other men when explosions trap workers underground. The Red Cross symbolizes human concern over people who suffer from disaster.

(--care for aged -- those whose minds have run amok --)

(Albert Schweitzer’s secret, year after year, for the phrase that would describe the basic Christian conviction on which civilization rests. -- paddling up an African river -- crocodiles, monkeys, jungle birds -- it came like a revelation: “Reverence for life.” He repeated it over and over again, and put it in his books as the key to future civilization.)

Why should we care whether men die like flies in the arctic or the jungle? Why care if men can be ruthlessly purged by the state? Why care if people are degraded to slavery? Because it is true that God suffers in the hurt of man.

It is also clear that if Christ had not come, there would be no sense of the sacredness of life. It is not physical death which troubles us, so much as the thought of spiritual death. His message of eternity, which so sustained the early Christians facing martyrdom, is what sustains us.

Because Jesus came, we know that we do not need to face the strain of life alone. In Him we are strengthened for anything.

(This is suggested in Admiral Bird’s experience in Antarctica -- alone save for a few minutes of radio talk with friends at Little America each day -- Illness cut that off. -- no strength to crank the hand generator to renew the battery. -- Life could not last long in the bitter cold. and desolation. Days later -- voices --hut door opened. emotions let loose. Those were the men who cared for him enough to risk their lives for him. In his need they sought him. -- The salvation of Jesus is like that.)

Life is never crushed beyond repair with a God who is seeking us. The “light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness cannot put it out.”

Since Christ did come, there is a word of hope and triumph over the failure of our dreams.

We are impatient to see the scaffold tumble the evil thrones of the earth to dust. But whether we see it, or our children’s children see it, it will come. For God is patient beyond imagining, and sure beyond our comprehension.

In some valley of the Alps, the sunrise is 4 hours in coming. A motion picture camera can record it so as to make it appear in 90 seconds. That’s the way we want it. “Hurry up.” But it comes in God’s deliberateness just the same -- and better.

You can wager you life on that.

“The stars in their courses are one with the forces

That fight for Christ’s way and his truth.”

Christ came to make us see that even a cross testifies to the hope and assurance of the future. And because he came, we look ahead with great hope toward what is yet to be.

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, December 7, 1952

Wisconsin Rapids, November 27, 1955 (pp 5-8)