Christian Approach to Plagues

Wow.  Plagues.  What’s a Christian to do?

Matthew 25:36 (ESV)
³⁶  I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’

In 250 a.d., during the first year of the Great Persecution that took the lives of perhaps thousands of Christians, Cyprian’s Plague broke out in the Roman Empire and lasted twelve years.  It was called “Cyprian’s Plague because Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, historically was the first to describe it.  At the time, the population of Rome was fewer than a million people.  5,000 people a day were dying in the city at the plague’s peak.

Romans fled the city.  Because of the great Roman highway system and efficient maritime commerce, the plague spread like wildfire.  Within weeks, the plague had reached the city of Alexandria in Egypt.  Here is a description of the scene in that city given us by its Bishop, Dionysius:

“[The pagans] thrust aside anyone who began to be sick, and kept aloof even from their dearest friends, and cast the sufferers out upon the public roads half dead and left them unburied and treated them with contempt when they died.” 

The plague we face today, the Coronavirus, is not so severe as this, but we can draw instruction from the Christians in Alexandria and Rome concerning how they dealt with a spreading plague.  Dionysius continues:

“Very many of our brethren, while in their exceeding love and brotherly kindness, did not spare themselves, but kept by each other, and visited the sick without thought of their own peril, and ministered to them assiduously and treated them for their healing in Christ, died from time to time most joyfully . . . Drawing upon themselves their neighbors’ diseases, and willingly taking over to their own persons the burden of suffering of those around them.”

That’s radical Christianity!

Because of the way Christians ministered to the sick of Rome and the rest of the Roman Empire during this period, much of the general public’s view changed from hating the Christians to a sense of gratitude.  During this time, the percentage of Christians increased for a couple of reasons.  First, more Christians survived the plague because of their care for each other, and many non-believers became Christians, attracted to a self-sacrificing faith whose members were willing to die in order to help them and their loved ones.

The Council of Nicaea (325 a.d.) just 12 years after the Edict of Milan which made Christianity legal in the Roman Empire, commanded a hospice to treat the sick and injured be built in every city large enough to contain a cathedral.

The first Christian hospices and hospitals were more than what we see today.  They ministered to the sick, of course, but they also provided shelter for the poor and homeless as well as for Christian pilgrims.

The first true hospital was built by Basil, Bishop of Caesarea, about 369 a.d.  His hospital was just one of several buildings which together included the hospital to tend the sick, a rehabilitation unit, and workshops for training those with no occupational skills.

Within two hundred years of Basil’s hospital, hospitals had become a common part of monasteries.  By the beginning of the Reformation, there were 37,000 Benedictine monasteries that cared for the sick.  Prior to the Christian hospices and hospitals, there is no evidence of such establishments functioning solely on gifts and volunteer workers.

The Christian role when people are in need and hurting is not to hide away or run from the peril.  We are to seek ways we can aid the sick and dying.  If you have an elderly relative or friend, call them to check on them and brighten their day.  Many schools are closed and parents are desperate for child care.  We can volunteer to watch the kids for neighbors while they are at work.  We can write to nursing home residents, hospital patients, veterans’ homes.  We can put our light on a lampstand and not hide it under a basket.  A friend of mine has assembled prayer groups to pray for those in need.  Let’s not let our light hide from the world under a basket but shine on a lampstand.