If you take a quick scroll through Twitter or turn on the news for all of two minutes during this time, you might hear something like the phrase, “This is an unprecedented time in human history.” And in many ways what’s going on right now in our city, our country, and our world, does feel that way. None of us have faced a global pandemic like this in our lifetime. The effects on our work, our kids’ schools, our livelihood, the economy, our healthcare, and so on and so forth feels like unchartered territory. For us here and now this is unprecedented, but in the grand scheme of the history of the world, we are not the first Christians to face a global pandemic like this one.In 165 AD, a plague known as the Antonine Plague, spread from the Huns, to the Germans, and then throughout the Roman Empire, killing a quarter to one-third of the population. A little less than a century later, in 250 AD, the Cyprian Plague hit Rome, and it was believed that at its peak, almost 5,000 people a day were dying from the disease.
During these and many other times throughout human history, the Church was faced with a decision that we as Christians face every day - How do we love God and love our neighbor in the place, time, and circumstance where we find ourselves?
During the Antonine Plague, Christians stepped in to serve those in need at great risk to themselves. When the Cyprian Plague hit Rome most of the population fled in an effort to distance themselves from the disease in self-preservation, Christians stepped out in faith to care for those in distress.
Instead of fear and despondency, the earliest Christians would stay and tend to the sick and dying, knowing full well that it would likely result in their own deaths. They showed works of unreasonable, sacrificial mercy that simply dumbfounded the pagans. In Rome, the Christians buried not just their own, but pagans who had died without funds for a proper burial. They also supplied food for thousands of people on a daily basis.
During the Plague in Alexandria in the 1300s, when nearly everyone else fled the city to escape the disease, the early Christians risked their lives for one another by simple deeds of washing the sick, offering water and food, and consoling the dying. At the risk of their own lives, they saved an immense number of lives. Their even basic amounts of nursing and care greatly reduced mortality. Simple provisions of food and water allowed the sick that were temporarily too weak to cope for themselves to recover instead of dying miserably.
So basically everyone who could was running from the plague. Except for one group. Instead of running from the plague, they ran to it: the Christians who were moved by death defying compassion.
Bishop and historian of the early church, Eusebius, recorded that during the plague, “All day long some of them [the Christians] tended to the dying and to their burial, countless numbers with no one to care for them. Others gathered together from all parts of the city, a multitude of those withered from famine and distributed bread to them all.”
But what encouragement does that give us as the people of God in a time where we are told what might be most loving is actually staying away? Where being most helpful is actually to not step towards those who are sick?
Theologian Martin Luther provides some insight here. When the Bubonic Plague came back to Germany in 1527, Luther’s hometown of Wittenberg was greatly affected. In response, he wrote a letter to his friend and fellow pastor Dr. John Hess. In the letter, entitled “Whether One Should Flee From A Deadly Plague”, Luther writes:
I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance inflict and pollute others and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me however I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely as stated above. See this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy and does not tempt God.
What was happening in 165 AD, 250 AD, the 1300s and in 1527 was that people were fleeing from one another, not because that was most loving, but because they desired self-protection and self-preservation. They weren’t social distancing out of love and sacrifice, they were doing so out of fear and selfishness.
Luther’s encouragement to us as Christians is to consider, as the early church did, what is the most loving response? We learn in these moments to move towards those in need, not away from them. Even if we socially distance, we still consider how to love and care for those in the pandemic of our day, as we learn from the example of Christ-followers who have come before us.