What do you think would have happened if Jesus wasn’t born?
We would have some serious problems! The biggest of which would be our salvation. As Peter said about Jesus, “There is no salvation through anyone else, nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved.” (Acts 4:12) Without Jesus, we would still be waiting for a savior and messiah, someone to deliver us from sin and death.
So what would have happened in the world and history? It is impossible to speculate, but the world would be very different. Instead of us being Catholics or even Christians for that matter, we might follow one of several different religions. Perhaps, we might still be pagans believing into multiple gods. I think many of us would be atheistic (believing God does not exist) or agnostic (believing there is no way to know if God exists) or maybe something like deistic (believing there is a God, but he is distant and uninvolved with us). Even the Romans as they grew near to the end of their empire began to disbelieve in their pagan gods as they grew more advanced. History would certainly have had turned out differently. For one thing, there would have been no monks to preserve learning in the Middle Ages. So who knows what the world would be like today if Jesus were never born. Of course, it has always been in God’s plan since the beginning to send us His Son as our savior. So let us thank God that Jesus was born and that He came to save us. Lent is a great time to remind ourselves that we desperately need that.
-Fr. Greg
