by Zach Kincaid
At no other point has the whole world melted into a mold that looks like the end. You can cite wars and all their rumors but they are starting points that progressed us here to a tiny infectious agent that masquerades itself until it kills us, or at least some of us. Sound familiar? It’s the garden story recycled. Bite the apple of globalism and greed; reap the bitterness of disease. OK, maybe it’s not so straight-forward, but there are certain parallels of Satan all done up as an angel of light but only offering snake oil, and gardens with all those climbing trees and a few shrubs that invite whispers and deception.
China. I don’t know why, but this area of the world has brought forward disease after disease. SARS, bird flu and the novel coronavirus are just the latest concoctions. The kong flus from last century came from China as did the king of them all, the Black Plague of the 1300s. The Silk Road is the plastic and gadget parade now. We know in our gut that something cheap is often costly in the end.
But we’re biting into the apple nonetheless. We don’t know what our highest good is because we forgot the definition of good altogether. So we make it up. Most would say their highest good is staying healthy. And if we reduce the onslaught of modern medicine, it’s simple: beat death for as long as you can no matter what door he knocks on. In other words, stay healthy. It’s not a bad mantra. Jesus says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17). Who can blame people for misinterpreting him to mean some version of staying healthy? But we know he’s not talking about nursing our symptoms or keeping us healthy. That would be far too easy and temporal.
Jesus says much tougher truths in several other situations. When Jesus is leaving the Temple in John 9, he passes by a man blind from birth. He stops, spits in the dirt to make a muddy mixture, and rubs it onto the eyes of the man who finally is able to see! Jesus explains that the man was blind for one reason alone: “that the works of God might be displayed in him” (9:3).
We hear the same explanation from Jesus in John 11. This time his good friend Lazarus is dead. He’s really dead – like four days old dead – before Jesus arrives. As you might know, the layout of where Bethany is in proximity to Jerusalem, where Jesus is hanging out at the time, might be a good 30-minute walk at best (longer today because you have to drive an hour to get around the wall). There’s no reason for Jesus to wait, especially since it greatly upsets Lazarus’s sisters, Mary and Martha, also good friends of Jesus. What does Jesus have to say? “It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it” (11:4). And just before he shouts for Lazarus to resurrect, he says, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me” (11:41-42).
Why are these instances important in the latest threat to our lives? Because our highest good of maintaining health is not God’s highest good. Time and time again, Scripture is trying to untangle the knot we made in the garden, not because it might be a twisted noose, but because it does not give God glory. It is deficient; it is sin; it is diseased to the core.
Our highest good must be well outside of our goodwill; it must rest in the truth of Romans 8:14, “For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.”
It must abide in the tension of Job 1: 21, “Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord,” (It should also be coupled with the word about Job years later, how the Lord was compassionate and merciful as we read in James 5:11).
It must embrace the whole context of I Corinthians 6:19-20 and not use it as bait for some vegan-fad lifestyle. Paul says here, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” He’s addressing sin and sexual deviance that drives a wedge into what we are made to become.
If we face any conflict, whether small or mammoth-sized, like the coronavirus, we must order the good and not place ourselves in the center of concern. The diseased times of old announces the Christians at work, caring, not abandoning the cities, and fleeing to the hills.
Dionysius is the bishop of Alexandria during the Plague of Cyprian in 251-266. It sweeps through the Roman Empire, notably killing 5,000 in Rome alone. Some believe even now, that this fearless martyrdom for others helps spread the truth of Christianity. He writes this in a letter from 260:
At all events most of the brethren through their love and brotherly affection for us spared not themselves nor abandoned one another, but without regard to their own peril visited those who fell sick, diligently looking after and ministering to them and cheerfully shared their fate with them, being infected with the disease from them and willingly involving themselves in their troubles. Not a few also, after nursing others back to recovery, died themselves, taking death over from them and thus fulfilling in very deed the common saying, which is taken always as a note of mere good feeling; for in their departure they became their expiatory substitutes. At all events, the very pick of our brethren lost their lives in this way, both priests and deacons and some highly praised ones from among the laity, so that this manner of dying does not seem far removed from martyrdom, being the outcome of much piety and stalwart faith. So, too, taking up the bodies of the saints on their arms and breasts, closing their eyes and shutting their mouths, bearing them on their shoulders and laying them out for burial, clinging to them, embracing them, washing them, decking them out, they not long after had the same services rendered to them; for many of the survivors followed in their train. But the Gentiles behaved quite differently: those who were beginning to fall sick they thrust away, and their dearest they fled from, or cast them half dead into the roads: unburied bodies they treated as vile refuse; for they tried to avoid the spreading and communication of the fatal disease, difficult as it was to escape for all their scheming. (“To the Brethren in Alexandria”, Eus., H. E. vii. 22)
During the same plague, we have an anonymous observer, likely a cleric in Carthage, who says,
Do we not see the rites of death every day? Are we not witnessing strange forms of dying? Do we not behold disasters from some previously unknown kind of plague brought on by furious and prolonged diseases? And the massacre of wasted cities? Whence we can recognize what great dignity there is in martyrdom, to whose glory even the pestilence is beginning to compel us. And so that we may pass over all the rest, let us recall how great a glory it is to come to Christ without stain, to be a colleague in his passion, to reign in all eternity with the Lord, to be absent from the looming destruction of this age, and not to share the common fate of others amidst the bloody destruction of ravaging diseases. (De laude martyrii)
Martin Luther writes about the Black Plague, still a menace in the 1500s. It kills an estimated 200 million during its 200-plus years course that begins in the 1300s. He says,
Those who are engaged in a spiritual ministry such as preachers and pastors must likewise remain steadfast before the peril of death. We have a plain command from Christ, “A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep but the hireling sees the wolf coming and flees” [John 10:11]. For when people are dying, they most need a spiritual ministry which strengthens and comforts their consciences by word and sacrament and in faith overcomes death. However, where enough preachers are available in one locality and they agree to encourage the other clergy to leave in order not to expose themselves needlessly to danger, I do not consider such conduct sinful because spiritual services are provided for and because they would have been ready and willing to stay if it had been necessary. We read that St. Athanasius fled from his church that his life might be spared because many others were there to administer his office. Similarly, the brethren in Damascus lowered Paul in a basket over the wall to make it possible for him to escape, Acts 9 [:25]. And also in Acts 19 [:30] Paul allowed himself to be kept from risking danger in the marketplace because it was not essential for him to do so. (Luther Works, vol .43)
During the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia at least 5,000 die. Richard Allen, who starts the African Methodist Episcopal church, Absalom Jones, who helps Allen with the Free African Society, and Benjamin Rush, physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, all greatly contribute to people’s care in the name of Jesus. Rush sees some 100 patients a day with a staff that begins to also get the fever and die. Allen writes the following:
When the mortality came to its greatest stage, it was impossible to procure sufficient assistance; therefore many whose friends and relations had left them, died unseen and unassisted. We have found them in various situations--some lying on the floor, as bloody as if they had been dipped in it, without any appearance of their having had even a drink of water for their relief; others lying on a bed with their clothes on, as if they had come fatigued, and lain down to rest; some appeared as if they had fallen dead on the floor, from the position we found them in. Surely our task was hard; yet through mercy we were enabled to go on.
We have picked up little children that were wandering they knew not where, (whose parents had been cut off,) and taken them to the orphan house; for at this time the dread that prevailed over people's minds was so general, that it was a rare instance to see one neighbour visit another, and friends, when they met in the streets, were afraid of each other; much less would they admit into their houses the distressed orphan that had been where the sickness was. This extreme seemed in some instances to have the appearance of barbarity. With reluctance we call to mind the many opportunities there were in the power of individuals to be useful to their fellow men, yet through the terror of the times were omitted. (The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen)
Time and time again, the Christians stayed and served, stayed and sacrificed, stayed and died in order to be a greater witness to the truth of Jesus Christ in their lives. They stayed to be a testimony to the glory of God. I hope in the present crisis, however we manifest it, we are not simply the hoarders and the recluses, the live streamers and those who go running to our homes as if they were the hills, but in small and mighty ways, we reflect the glory of God with a reckless abandonment. If we do, it will bear the marks of all those saints before us, and even more, give testimony to the God who touched the leper, the diseased, the broken, the dead, and like Ezekiel’s dry bones, he breathed life into them!