Makes sense. 
Just found a link that seems to show an equivalent model, but which introduces an inductor to what I mentioned. I wonder what the MCU would do if presented with something like that. Where this is all going, is I'm just curious how the waveform would look without the crystal cleaning it up with it's defined resonant frequency. I wonder if it would also require an excessive amount of power from the MCU, or if it would, as I mentioned before, just timeout if it didn't eventually get a response it was expecting, or if it would even know.
Thanks,
John