Technically, the word “plague” refers to the terrible scourge that ravaged Europe in the 14^thcentury, ultimately felling a full third of the population. In a more general sense, the word can refer to any widespread illness or even a thing that causes trouble and even despair. However you cut it, plague is not a positive.

As I write after a long absence from these pages, we humans are facing a new kind of ravaging, something not seen on this scale in a hundred years, since the flu influenza following the end of WWI. In this technically advanced world (at least in the developed part of it) we’re not supposed to die by the millions from some unseen little organism. Yes, we’ve thought about it and have even seen some frightening precursors to our current bug (MERS, SARS, etc…). We’ve even planned for it. But, for whatever reason or set of reasons, we were not adequately prepared for this latest attack. It is shaking us hard, even to our knees.

Some of us in North America and Europe are more than a little inconvenienced. We “shelter in place,” reduce our venturing outside, search for and fret about supplies, worry about those we know who are at “high risk.” For others, the disease is very up front and personal. While we somehow just go year-to-year accepting many tens of thousands of deaths from seasonal flu (in our country at least), or tens of thousands of deaths in our inner cities from the violence born of gangs and drugs or other tens of thousands of deaths from another “epidemic” caused by opioid abuse, we are struck by the unique and terrifying nature of a thing now called by various names: Covid19, the Corona Virus, the Wuhan Virus and so on.

And yet.

While it’s been many months since I’ve written, it’s no surprise to anyone who happens upon this latest posting, that I follow Jesus and have done so with a singular purpose for just over fifteen years now. I may have written somewhere near one thousand single-spaced pages by now. Periodically, I transfer them into an informal “manuscript,” the title of which is Love Letters to God: A Pilgrim’s Journey. Most of you probably don’t know that. As of now, there is no end in sight that I can see!

So, yes, I’m what most people would call a Christian. As much as I don’t like buzz words and labels because they often simplify when complexity is more appropriate or they stereotype when depth is called for, I accept the title. I was at least as surprised as anyone when it became thunderously evident on a March evening in 2005 that that’s what I was. Never in my wildest dreams …

Of course, Easter is traditionally celebrated in our culture as a kind of rite of spring. From the dreariness of winter and (at least in some Christian traditions) the emergence form the Lenten observance, Easter is quite the secular celebration as well. Flowers and bonnets and bunnies, it’s a children’s holiday like Christmas.

One wonders about this year. I expect families will still do their best to bring Easter to their children but, with social distancing and the other restraints, one can’t really imagine extended families and good friends congregating for Easter dinner and large Easter egg hunts. It promises to be a very toned-down Sunday, a week away as of this writing.

But, that’s all not really my point or what prompted me to get my laptop out this afternoon.

Of course, I subscribe to the worldview that there is a supernatural and all powerful creative and loving force we know as God. This God knows me personally and loves me regardless. Loves me unconditionally, as a matter of fact. I was shocked beyond belief to discover this. I’m still shocked today.

And, speaking of shocking, we are asked to believe that this God who is vast beyond our wildest imagination, chose to become one of us and, while alive, taught us and showed us how to live, also explaining the true nature of all reality. But, that’s only the half of it.

The other half was violently thrust upon mankind on a desolate hill outside the City of Peace (Jerusalem). This Emmanuel (God Among Us) was discarded like trash after arriving triumphently (as prophesied) the prior week on what we now call Palm Sunday. Yes, he was tortured and left to die a horrible death but that’s in fact only a side story to what really happened.

If what we are told to believe really did not happen, then the Christian is blind and without purpose. People like me are to be pitied … as we are in many quarters, while despised in others. We were and are duped. We believe in something truly absurd. There never was a God Made Into Man and certainly not the one believed by billions through the millenia.

On the other hand, if it’s true, everything changed. Everything.

This is extremely hard to believe if one does not believe. Should one believe, it actually makes perfect sense, accepting of course that this “makes perfect sense” does not mean there are not big questions begging investigation and calling for some kind of resolution.

What happened on that hill is that Jesus intentionally took on all of mankind’s sins and purposefully separated himself from his Father. In our present context, he took on the Greatest Plague of All … and died. God Become Man became Sin in our place and carried it to his death. My sin. Yours. All of it.

This is a very tough thing for moderns to hear because, well, you know, sin is not a popular subject for our attention. Heck, we’re promised happiness and we search however we can to get it. Damn the consequences.

Little did these first followers of Jesus know what he did on that fateful crucifixion Friday, the day after celebrating the Passover Feast. Little did they know that the blood of the lamb that marked the doors of the Hebrew people enslaved in Egypt many centuries before was now the blood of the Lamb of God. And, little did they know that, like when death “passed over” their marked houses, death would pass over the Son of Man, too.

I was raised to see Easter as the spring version of Christmas … a thing seen through a child’s eyes. Later, both were opportunities to feast with families and friends and so share smiles and laughter.

Today, and for the last fifteen years, Easter is really Resurrection Sunday, the day that Jesus rose from the dead, having defeated the Plague and offering eternal life, the only perfect cure.

I first heard his voice on Easter and will, without a doubt, hear it permanently in my next life.

I have no crystal ball to know what the coming weeks and months will bring. Who knows how our world will be changed? This current pandemic is stretching us and causing shockwaves everywhere. Personally, I’m in that high risk category and know what it’s like to desperately seek oxygen with diseased lungs. It’s terrifying. I pray that we are able to defeat this thing much sooner rather than later and that we will be better prepared the next time around.

But, regardless of what happens, I take comfort in knowing that the thing that has most plagued mankind throughout our entire existence is no match for God’s grace and perfect love.

Amen.