The Impact of Jesus

Excerpted from If God Came by Jim McGuiggan, p. 101-102
via Sentry Magazine, Vol. 21 No. 4, December 1995

Take a moment and think about it. How did the son of a Jewish carpenter manage to affect our world so powerfully? How many millions of church buildings and edifices have been erected to his name in the last 19 centuries? How many songs and poems have been written to glorify him? How many millions would y״u guess? How many thousands of millions of books have been published either in favor of him or against him? (For no one publishes countless thousands of books against one who doesn’t matter.) How much music has been written to lift the heart to thinking of him? How many hospitals, rest homes, orphanages, nursing homes, and health organizations have this Galilean inspired?

What can be said about the life of Jesus? Who can even touch the hem of the garment of the subject? How do we appraise one whose words have dominated the civilized world since their utterance? Whose word, at this very moment, in the space age when men have isolated the gene and photographed the atom, is the watchword and safeguard of our society? At this very moment, there are millions upon millions of people whose lives are dominated by the words of this Galilean. He is prayed to and prayed through by numberless millions in every generation. He stands astride the world like a colossus. Where his influence has not been, there is poverty, filth, and a cancerous naturalism. Where his principles are stifled, there is crime rampant, slums abounding, and vice prevailing. His name is sung in countless buildings set up to his glory. His name is the last on the lips of millions as they make their way into the other world. His book has no peer, his Church is deathless, his morality unprecedented, his code of ethics immeasurably above all the rest, his influence unbelievable, his authority universal, his love beyond knowledge, his followers unbeatable and uncountable, his benevolence incalculable.