Christians Responding to COVID - Lessons From The Ancient Church

When COVID-19 first hit, for many of us, it was just another headline about some group of people far away. As the months rolled by and terror seized the globe, new generations — such as mine — started to experience for the first time a complete shift in the fundamental day-to-day routine of our lives. For us, things have never been like this, and I know that me and many of my peers looked to the church to see how we should respond.

During the first months of the pandemic, I started asking questions concerning how the world sees us Christians and how we should be responding to the virus. I looked around, and my observations were the same terror as the rest of society, the same distancing, and the same fear. This seriously broke my heart and made me doubt my own community. Is that how Christians should be living? Is loving our neighbor isolating from them and protecting ourselves? Yes, this disease is terrifying. However, killer plagues are not as unheard of as we might think. Humanity has faced dozens of these viruses, and so has the church. My intentions are to call Christians to action and remind all of us of what Christians used to be and what we must become again if we’re really to change the world and show the love of Jesus.

In a history class at my university, I heard something that shocked me to my core: in the first centuries of the early church, the Christians were known for something astounding — they would stay in the cities during times of a plague and take care of the sick. Now, to understand this, in ancient Rome, the normal reaction to disease was to throw the afflicted into the streets, even if they were your loved ones. If someone had the plague, it was like you didn’t know them. If you were rich enough, you would flee the city and stay in the countryside. What made Christianity stand out from all of the pagan priests and other religious organizations was that, in times of disaster, they took care of their own sick and also those thrown out by the community. Some interesting history is that the Roman emperor Julian “the Apostate” was known for bitterly complaining about the “Galileans” who took care of even the non-Christian sick, attempting to revive paganism in Rome by having the pagan priests imitate the Christians with acts of charity.

This greatly kindled my curiosity. Later in my research, I found that over a millennia later Martin Luther, a prominent theologian and leader of the church during the Reformation, also stayed in his city and helped the sick during times of disease. Contextually, Germany in the Middle Ages was a bit better than ancient Rome concerning plagues, but the same instinctual reaction to flee was put on Luther to leave by his friends and family, and he didn’t. He risked his life and the lives of his family in order to love on and minister to the world around him in times of disaster. He did this during three different major epidemics throughout his lifetime, one of them being the Bubonic Plague, otherwise known as the Black Death.

When I look at the ancient way of the Christian faith and then observe the modern church, it seems to me as if many of us have lost a core part of who we are and what we are meant to be. I include myself in this; during much of the span of COVID-19, I didn’t volunteer, I didn’t “rush into any burning buildings” — I just continued my gardening job and did my best to socially distance. My own personal conviction is why I am writing this.

Here is what I think might be a part of the problem. I think we’ve become too comfortable as Christians and that we’ve lost sight of what we are called to do. I feel like we’ve chosen to focus inward instead of on the outward needs of the community. Now, I know that the modern Church has a lot of areas that need attention, and I won’t try to fix all of its problems in this article. However, I do think that I have something to contribute to the conversation and give insight to steer us back to the original tenants of our faith.

To do this, we must first answer how and why these early Christians did what they did. What made Christians sacrifice their own personal well-being for others? For the early Christians, they had something so powerful keeping them going that they died from exposure to the sickness by taking care of the afflicted. In fact, if you think about it, the first martyrs for the faith were these Christians, laying their lives down for the sick and helpless. They had this powerful compassion and self-sacrificial love that completely changed the culture and atmosphere of old Rome.

I believe this powerful compassion came from the teachings of Jesus Christ: “This is my commandment: Love each other in the same way I have loved you. There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:12–13, NLT). Jesus made this statement at a dinner He was having with his disciples right before the arrest that would lead to his crucifixion the cross. Right before He died, He said to love others and to put other’s lives above your own. The early Christians took this to heart, laying down their lives like Jesus for those around them. Other teachings of Jesus, such as Matthew 7:12 and Luke 10:27, speak of doing to others as you would have them do to you and loving your neighbor as yourself. Additionally, in a parable Jesus told about taking care of those in need, He said, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40, NIV). In this, Jesus is saying that taking care of the needs of others is like taking care of and loving him. This is so powerful and can help us understand the strength found in the early church.

Now, let’s dissect this; in our time of need, what would we want our neighbor to do for us? If we were sick, we would need people to bring us food, to take care of us, to make sure we were doing okay, and to treat us with dignity. I actually got COVID-19 back in December 0f 2020, and it felt like I was being kicked onto the streets by society. Even when I came back to work, I felt like an outcast. People were afraid of me even though I was three weeks past my exposure as if I was still contagious. During my quarantine, I was so fortunate to have a family to take care of me, and I never need to be hospitalized. However, my heart goes out to people not as fortunate as I. I feel for all of those who have also been thrown into the streets or for the people going through more life-threatening strains than I had.

Just like the early Christians, I believe we are called to a higher sense of this emergency, a calling to name altruism and serving others as our greatest priority. As followers of Jesus, we need to live out His teaching. We are invited by Jesus to join him in sacrificing for others to show the radical love of God. Some ending thoughts are about what makes Christians different from any other person in the world. How does the world see us? Are we self-serving or are we going to get out there in the trenches and start making some change in the world? If we aren’t living out the radical and powerful self-sacrificial love that Jesus commanded us to have, are we really following Jesus?

There’s no better time than now to show the heart of Christ in this hurting world.