Christ and Covid

Midweek Vespers 

The Baptism of Our Lord 

A Reading from Mark’s Gospel:

As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

That evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, “Everyone is searching for you.” He answered, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.” And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean!” Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.

After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.” But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.

The Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

A miraculous healing would be nice right about now, don’t you think? How lovely if Jesus were to descend from heaven and simply blow away the covid-19 virus, like Kenneth Copeland claimed to do. While He’s at it, it would be nice if He got rid of cancer and heart disease and the opioid crisis and student debt and maybe taught public officials basic ethics, or grammar.

We are promised in the Scriptures—and in Christ the living Word of God—that all things shall be somehow set right in the end. All the tragedies, injustices, and horrors of human history, all the blood we’ve spilled and the suffering we’ve inflicted, will ultimately, impossibly, be rectified. Then shall every tear be dried, every wound healed, and every corpse disposed like trash be raised up to new and eternal life in perfect bliss forever.

It’s a promise so extravagant that we barely dare to believe it. For indeed if Christ is risen, then nothing else matters, for all shall be set right at the last. And if Christ is not risen, then nothing else matters, because all the things we claim to love—goodness, beauty, truth, justice, mercy—they’re all just words, just lies, if indeed everything simply falls apart in the end, lost into a nihilistic abyss.

Someday Christ will set things right. Someday all shall be made new in Him. And there won’t be covid or cancer or heart disease or drugs or debt. There won’t be ignorance or sin or evil or despair. There will only be joy. There will only be life. We just wish He’d do it now, don’t we? We just wish He’d snap His fingers and make it right today—because that’s what we would do, if we were God. Right? Or maybe He could just fix some of it: fix the pandemic, fix the government, fix us.

This is known as theodicy, the problem of evil. And it’s not just a problem for religion but for all of human experience. Try as we might, we cannot deny that some things are right and some things are wrong. And because they are wrong, we cannot let them stand. We must not allow them to stand. And if we who are sinners can see this, imagine how important it must be to God.

So much of this covid crisis has been manmade. No, not because the virus was cooked up in a lab somewhere. It wasn’t. But it did arise in the cruelty of wet markets. It did spread because of selfishness, ignorance, and fear. Our impotence in the face of the pandemic is not the result of some direct divine punishment but of decades of policies aimed at gutting the common good, making sure that most of us have no stable income, no stable healthcare, no opportunity to just stay home and not work in order to prevent the spread of this disease.

And don’t even get me started on how we isolate the elderly, then write them off as expendable. The virus may be natural but our response to it has been anything but. We brought this on ourselves by our refusal to love our neighbor as ourselves. Yet even now miracles abound. Do we realize how astounding it is that we already have a vaccine for this disease, how quickly it was developed, and how astonishingly effective it is proving to be? That’s amazing. What a testament to healing.

And you can certainly say, “Pastor, that’s not a miracle. That’s science. That’s reason.” And you’d be right. Science is a miracle. Logic is a miracle. How miraculous it is that our universe operates by rational laws and that these laws have proven intelligible to our squishy little monkey minds! Remember that when we call Jesus the Word of God, that “Word” in Greek is Logos—which means reason, sense, the intelligible patterns of our God. Faith and reason are not enemies. They’re two wings of the same bird. And only a fool would think that we could stumble through this life without constantly relying on them both.

For Christians, the problem of evil, the problem of suffering, is not insurmountable. We believe that God did not create evil, does not intend evil, and surrenders His own life upon the Cross in order to heal all the world of all our wounds. The world was made good at the start, and will be remade good in the end. And by grace we have a foretaste of this feast to come in Jesus Christ our Lord.

The problem for us is the meantime, the in-between time. We are here and now, and here and now things are pretty messed up. People are dying. There’s injustice, suffering, lies, death, disease, despair, and evil seems everywhere ascendant. Someday it’ll all be set right. But what about today? Why doesn’t Christ fix things now?

From His perspective, I suppose He already has. God in His eternity is beyond time; for Him, our salvation has always already been achieved. We just need to catch up, in a sense. Furthermore the supernatural is not some magic solution to our problems. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, the miracles of Jesus are not unnatural, but simply natural things sped up. Anyone can make wine, or heal wounds, or overthrow injustice given time. Jesus simply manifests these things in who and what He is.

Time, then, is the issue—what to do with the time we have been given. We are here for an ever-briefer span of time. Even a century passes quickly looking back. Someday, things will be all right. But today there is work to be done. There are sick to be healed and hungry to be fed and oppressed to be liberated and wicked to be rebuked and sinners to be forgiven. Here and now we have the opportunity to be Christ for the world—to be His hands and feet and words and promise, to be members of His Body, reflections of His grace.

It seems that God would have the problems of humanity solved through humanity. Where is Christ at work today? He is hard at work answering prayer through you. So let us now go boldly forth and be Christ for a world still very much in need of Him.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.