He has insurance, but Christ.
Could you please tell me what the meaning of phrase above is?
I think that if the writer said "He has no insurance, but Christ" it would be correct.
The full text is here:
James scrubs the frying pan in the big kitchen sink and ponders how to rejig things so that he can feed his guests adequately without any electricity. The refrigerator isn’t working. At least he can cook with the gas oven. But he’s without a dishwasher. Breakfast was easy enough—eggs and pastries, and nobody much felt like eating anyway, from what he could see, after that poor girl fell down the stairs. He’s lost his appetite too. He feels terrible for that man’s loss. And the whole thing makes him sick with anxiety. It’s the kind of situation every hotel owner loses sleep over—an accident in his hotel, a fatal accident at that. He has insurance, but Christ. What a thing to happen. He knows he’s not to blame. His carpets aren’t loose—he’d gone up to the landing and checked over that carpet himself the first chance he got. It was fine. She must have stumbled for no reason. There’s absolutely no way anyone can blame him or his hotel.
An Un Wanted Guest by Shari Lapena
Answer
"Christ" in this context serves as an exclamation rather than a literal reference to Jesus Christ. It can convey a fairly wide range of emotions, but the next sentence ("What a thing to happen.") implies that in this case it's some sort of sadness about the hotel owner's situation.
So the sentence means that even though the owner has insurance (which presumably shields him from legal implications of the accident), it's still a terrible thing to happen. I think you want to interpret it as something like "The owner has no insurance, but he has Christ on his side", which is definitely not what the author meant given the context.
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