If Jesus Had Never Been Born
by the Rev. Dr. Jim Lawrence
co-minister of the Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco
 In the December, 1996 Issue of Our Daily Bread

The only child of a young couple was born after the father was sent to the fighting in Vietnam, and the father did not get a chance to see his daughter until the war was over three years later. The little girl's mother tried to bridge the daddy's absence by practicing a little ritual each night as she put the child to bed. After putting on her pajamas, the child would kneel at the side of the bed to say her prayers, then run over to a framed picture of her father, kiss the picture, and then tumble into bed.

The day came, finally, when her father came home. That very first night he helped his daughter put on her pajamas and get ready for bed. The little girl knelt down to say her prayers, and when she was finished, her mother said, "Now you can kiss your daddy good night." So the little child ran over to the night stand, kissed her father's picture, and tumbled into bed - leaving her real-life daddy standing there with open but empty arms!

Something like this happens every Christmas for many of us: We keep the traditions - we kiss the picture, if you will - but we fall shy of embracing Christ anew in our lives as a living presence. As John the evangelist wrote, "He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, yet the world knew Him not." But John also had a positive report: "But to all who received him, who believed in His name, He gave power to become children of God."

I suspect we know what I am getting at when I refer to how easily the season can pass without any profound connection to one's life. Year in, year out, the great Christmas wheel turns, and life goes on pretty much the same as before.

The first theological insight I can offer from the writings of the New Church [Swedenborgian] is an ironic one; namely, that this very ongoing capability of life's process is the result of the incarnation. The unbroken flow of life that we take for granted is itself a testimony to the effectiveness of the incarnation, rather than an argument against it. There is a great assumption so basic about life and world history, that we usually never realize we are card-carrying holders of it - the belief that the condition of psycho-spiritual freedom has always been a feature of life in this world. We tend to assume that the basic inherent freedoms - whether mental, moral, spiritual - that are a part of the human condition as we know it, are simply how life has always been for people. Unless we read Christian revelation, we don't really have any reason to assume otherwise.

But for the spiritual seeker who has reflected on Christ's advent and who absorbed the significance of Christ's life, this assumption is radically false. In fact, for those who have received Christ's power in their thinking, as well as their hearts, understanding the truth about this is what enables a Christian to call the One born of Mary, Savior and Redeemer of the world. To be sure, human beings were living full lives that led to heaven for tens of thousands of years before Christ. The purpose of Christ's life was not to give new truths: Recall that He claimed not to alter one jot or tittle of the spiritual law that had long been available.

No. We are given a piece of high metaphysics, an extraordinary revelation, as to why the human incarnation of God was necessary. This basic freedom to think our thoughts, to make spiritual choices in our lives, to act morally in situations of temptation and conflict - to be human, really - this very inner spiritual and psychological freedom we take utterly for granted - is the purpose of Christ's advent - or rather, saving it was the purpose. Revelation tells us that this freedom was in danger of being eclipsed.

Some might wonder how such a situation could possibly arise. To understand, one must be open to a spiritual view of all life. Because revelation also tells us that our inner spiritual and psychological freedom does not exist in a vacuum, but is created through a context of forces. That is, our freedom exists not because there is nothing there, but because there is an equilibrium of positive and negative forces creating the context of our souls' inner lives. It isn't the sort of thing we can detect by closing our eyes and concentrating on feeling it: it is too subtle for that. But revelation teaches that for every moment of our lives, good and evil forces flow into our inner spiritual spheres from spiritual worlds. Together, good and evil, positive and negative, if you will, comprise opposite moral forces that the Lord maintains in a precise equilibrium. Being precisely in equilibrium is crucial, because without a precise equilibrium, the stronger side will prevail automatically.

In prefect equilibrium, there is perfect freedom. In physics, when two forces are pitted against each other, other equally, the place in the exact middle is a state of rest. That is how the Lord creates an environment of spiritual freedom, so that we live constantly with good and evil influences manifesting in countless ways and under innumerable guises. Yet in the midst of that context of forces, our soul's center is in fundamental freedom, and it is through that freedom that we become human beings who can choose to live lives basically regenerating or basically degenerating.

And it is only a testimony to the Lord's ultimate respect for freedom that the impending imbalance was permitted to occur. We are informed also by revelation that in this play of freedom, a time came when evil was overtaking good. If such a trend had been allowed to continue, spiritual freedom and the strength to resist evil would have become impossible. As our statement of faith says, "He overcame the hells and so delivered us... Without this no mortal could have been saved..."

But for those who do not accept such high metaphysics or who have never even really thought about it, the assumption must be that the significance of Jesus' life lies in His being merely a very effective moral teacher, whose teachings inspired a worldwide movement. A significant historical figure, surely. But - and here's the telling point - such individuals without even thinking about it assume that if Jesus had not been born, life today would not be different in any fundamental way. The character of world history would be somewhat different without Christendom, but that only means that other religions would have picked up the slack.

Some of you know that under my cool, intellectual facade I'm just a sentimental sap. My favorite movie, which I watch a couple of times every year, is It's a Wonderful Life. The plot device of this Frank Capra masterpiece should be created for the Gospel, so that we moderns could see what life would be like if Jesus Christ had never been born. Imagine, if you can. Swedenborg in the role of Clarence, the angel, stroking his chin, saying, "So, you don't think the life of Christ really saved the world from spiritual destruction, eh? The idea of a divine incarnation seems too far-fetched, does it?"

Then imagine him looking upward with inspiration and exclaiming, "Say, that's a swell idea! Yeah, that should do it!" And then imagine him turning to us and saying, "Well, now, you are going to get a very rare privilege. You are going to get to see what the world would be like if Jesus Christ had never been born." For those who believe that the significance of Jesus' life lies merely in His role as a major spiritual teacher, the world would be little different than we now have it. Only the surface features of Christian architecture would be gone, but in their place would be other structures meeting the same basic human need.

Yet for those who believe Jesus' significance lies precisely in "the divinity of which He was begotten" (another phrase from our Statement of Faith), the makeover of the world would be as dramatic as the difference between the struggling but decent Bedford Falls and the harsh, predatory world of Pottersville. If darkness had overrun the spiritual environment of humans to such an extent that evil influences became irresistibly powerful, people would not even be able to conceive of morality and charity and goodness, much less enact them. With two thousand years of an inexorable slide into evil quicksand, this world would operate like the hells of Dante's Inferno, the first part of Goethe's Faustus, or Swedenborg's hellish regions of the spiritual world.

Absolute selfishness would reign. Safety and security as concepts would not exist, because everyone would be aggressively on the make without a concern for how it affects others. Friendship as we know it would be a foreign affection; only alliances of convenience would operate as a force bringing people together. Marriage love would be unknown; only calculating relationships based on using one another through biological urges and forces could result. Children would fend for themselves at very early ages, if they survived at all. Beauty in art would have long ago vanished, for the light of heaven would not have been available to inspire artists. Instead, the egotistical and cruel energies of evil would be all that existed to be expressed in art, and since evils would be all that existed to be expressed in art, and since evil is much driven to express itself, the landscape of art would by now be creative only in its endless variety of profane expression.

It is not even certain that life could have continued long for such evil may well have snuffed out the willingness to have children. Even if life managed to continue somehow, without a spiritual equilibrium creating its correlative spiritual freedom, human community would have devolved into something like trying to make it on the streets in the Tenderloin - though even worse, because still far more forces work for good there than would be now if God had not restored the balance of good through His divine incarnation.

This is the high metaphysic of Christmas. The holiday season's colorful rituals are but the palest of symbols when held against what they truly represent: a redemption from an enveloping darkness that would have absorbed our very ability to experience the tension of choice and to know, hopefully in growing measure, joy and peace through a regenerative life of making positive and wholesome choices. If people could experience what life would be like if Jesus Christ had never been born, then their joy would be just as ecstatic as was Handel's when he composed the Messiah for his Lord; as was Phillips Brooks when he wrote "O Little Town of Bethlehem"; as was the Apostle John when he wrote the prologue to the gospel that bears his name. We, too, might be inspired to such joyful expressions if we could truly comprehend what it would have meant if Jesus had never been born.

Christmas is a time for great rejoicing, when we recount the sacred events that saved the world and maintained a plane of life that enables us to receive our humanity with its precious freedom. Let us dare to believe what the gospels tell plainly. Let us sing praises to God for His redemption of the world!

Prayer

We thank You, Lord, this Christmas Sunday, for giving us the greatest gift of love, that of Yourself, born into our world to show us the way. Thank You for taking to Yourself that great power and reigning over sin and death. We accept your gift of overcoming the hells and freeing us to rise up once again and develop into the fullness for which we were created. Thanks for Your birth and life. Amen.

Scriptures:

Hear, O heavens, and listen, O earth; for the    Lord has spoken:
I reared children and brought them up.
but they have rebelled against me.
The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master's crib;
but Israel does not know, my people do not understand.

Ah, sinful nation, people lade with inequity,
offspring who do evil, children who deal corruptly.
who have forsaken the Lord,
who have despised the Holy One of Israel,
who are utterly estranged!

When you come to appear before me,
who asked this from your hand?
Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile;
incense is an abomination to me.
New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation -
I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.
Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them.
When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers, I will not listen;
your hands are full of blood.

...How the faithful city has become a whore!
She that was full of justice,
righteousness lodged in her - 
but now murderers!
Your silver has become dross, your wine is mixed with water.
Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves.
Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts.
They do not defend the orphan
and the widow's cause does not come before them.

Isaiah 1:2-4, 12-15, 21-23

Reading from Swedenborg

The Reason for Christ's Coming

The Lord came into the world chiefly for these two purposes, to remove hell from angels and from humankind, and to glorify His Human. For before the Lord's coming hell had grown up so far as even to infest the angels of heaven and also, by interposing itself between heaven and the world, to intercept the Lord's communication with people on earth, so that no Divine truth and good could pass from the Lord to people. Consequently a total damnation threatened the whole human race, and the angels of heaven could not have long continued to exist in their integrity. And thus, in order that hell might be removed, the Lord came into the world, and dislodged hell, subjugated it, and thus opened heaven; so that He could henceforth be present with people on earth, and save those who live according to His commandments and consequently could regenerated and save them, for those who are regenerated are saved. This is how it is to be understood, that, since all have been redeemed they may be regenerated, and because regeneration and salvation make one, all may be saved. So the teaching of the church, that without the Lord's coming no one could have been saved, is to be understood in this way, that without the Lord's coming no one could have been regenerated.

True Christian Religion #579