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Each year we hear the cry, “Put Christ back into Christmas”. It is a legitimate cry. However, some who use it give the impression that Christ has a natural right to everyone’s
homage. Life isn’t as straightforward as that. Christ earned his place in our hearts the hard way, through crucifixion followed by resurrection. His life was dedicated to the mission his Father gave him. He wants
people to be as genuine in accepting him as he is in offering them himself. This acceptance does not come about automatically.
The demands which Christ makes on people are considerable. Many find these
demands too hard to accept and turn elsewhere to find the secret to life. The fundamental and lifelong question for men and women is, what brings happiness? Where is it to be found? Whom can I trust to lead me
towards it? For Christians, Christ is the answer to the riddle of life. But in the world in which we live, he has a lot of competition.
There are those who seek happiness in the pleasures of food and drink
and sexual relationships. Others opt for the heady wine of power. Others again worship at the shrine of greed. Some turn to philosophical and spiritual ideas that offer the secret of life without reference to
Christ. Many of these routes turn out to be journeys along tracks ultimately leading nowhere.
Christ never expected any special treatment for his message. It had to stand or fall on its merits. It is
apparent from the Gospels that Christ could always give a good account of himself and of what he was teaching. He was a man among men. He did not claim any privileged position.
The early days of Christianity
are remarkable for the fact that belief in Christ spread in the corrupt society of the Roman Empire. Christianity offered none of the earthly delights of the pagan cults or the rarified satisfactions of stoic
philosophy. To be a Christian in the first three centuries was to leave oneself open to betrayal, imprisonment and even death. However, like the tide coming in imperceptibly, the number of Christians, many of them
in high places, grew until the Empire could no longer disregard them or push them out of the way.
Why did so many people embrace Christianity when there were other possibilities open to them? They saw the
power of God in the Christian way of life. How did pagans experience Christianity? They sensed that Christians had something more precious than anything they had. The peace of Christ, integrity – sexual morality was
an important element of this – and courage, the lived expression of their faith, made a profound impression. Before there were any representations of Christ in Christian buildings, Christ could be seen in the faces
of Christian men and women. Lived Christianity makes a powerful appeal to those who are searching.
The remarkable spread of Christianity at various periods in the last 2,000 years owes much to the dedication
of the preachers and to the openness of those who accepted their message. Christian values gradually found their way into particular cultures, one of the most powerful ways of handing on belief. These values became
so deeply embedded that many of us thought that life could not be lived in any other way. So we got a rude awakening when the culture we grew up with began to crumble.
Many forces – philosophical,
psychological, economic – have been at work to bring about the disintegration of our Christian culture, once so widespread and accepted. From the 60s onwards we have witnessed its obvious decline. Abortion is now
claimed as a right and euthanasia is seeking that status. Many people have decided that Christ and the Church have nothing worthwhile to say. They are setting out on new paths which in reality are old paths –
hedonism, materialism, individualism. They are reinventing the wheel and will find when they come full circle that they have gone nowhere.
The challenge to Christians today, as always, is to proclaim Christ.
In former times, the Gospel was brought to those who had never heard of Christ. Today the problem is to bring the Gospel to those who once believed in Christ but have let him go. This is a very difficult assignment
– how to win back those who once believed. No clear strategy has yet emerged to address this problem. However, there is one strategy that is always relevant – others will be impressed if they can see Christ in those
they meet. If you are a person of true peace, integrity, concern for others and at home in your humanity, you are preaching a powerful sermon. Others will want what they sense you have. As in the early days of the
Church, so now – in what some are calling the post-Christian age – our most powerful tool of evangelisation is the witness of our Christian lives.
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