Never Waste a Crisis

It is believed, Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli first said, “Never waste the opportunity offered by a good crisis.” Sir Winston Churchill popularized that saying with, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. The pandemic COVID-19 provides a good backdrop for us to examine the merits of this saying.

Although the first for all of us, our world has experienced a few global disasters. The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than World War I (WWI). Somewhere between 20 and 40 million people died. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. Known as the “Spanish Flu”, that pandemic killed more people in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351.

Like with COVID-19, Christians have had to live through and respond to pandemics in history. In fact, historians would confirm that one of the main catalysts for the church’s explosive growth in its early years was how Christians navigated disease, suffering, and death.   

In 249 to 262 CE, Western civilization was devastated by one of the deadliest pandemics in its history. The city of Rome was said to have lost an estimated 5,000 people a day at the height of the outbreak. One eyewitness, Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria, wrote that although the plague did not discriminate between Christians and non-Christians, “Its full impact fell on non-Christians.” Having noted the difference between Christian and non-Christian responses to the plague, he says of the non-Christians in Alexandria:

At the first onset of the disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead and treating unburied corpses as dirt, hoping thereby to avert the spread and contagion of the fatal disease; but do what they might, they found it difficult to escape.

A century later, the Roman Emperor Julian attempted to curb the growth of Christianity after the plague by leading a campaign to establish pagan charities that mirrored the work of Christians in his realm. In a 362 CE letter, Julian complained that his people needed to match the Christians in virtue, blaming the recent growth of Christianity on their “benevolence to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead, and the pretended holiness of their lives.” Elsewhere he wrote, “For it is a disgrace that . . . the impious Galileans [Christians] support not only their own poor but ours as well.” 

Though Julian questioned the motives of Christians, his embarrassment over public charities confirms that pagan efforts fell massively short of Christian standards of serving the sick and poor, especially during epidemics. According to Rodney Stark in The Rise of Christianity, this is because “for all that [Julian] urged pagan priests to match these Christian practices, there was little or no response because there were no doctrinal bases or traditional practices for them to build upon.”

The impact of this service was twofold. Firstly, Christian sacrifice for their fellow believers stunned the unbelieving world as they witnessed communal love like they’d never seen. Secondly, Christian sacrifice for non-Christians resulted in the early church experiencing exponential growth as non-Christian survivors, who benefited from the care of their Christian neighbors, converted to the faith in large numbers.

Back in the 1600s, Martin Rinkart was a Lutheran pastor from Germany. He found himself ministering in the midst of horrendous famine and disease. At the age of thirty-one he was commissioned to serve in his native town of Eilenburg. He went there as the war broke out and served for more than thirty years.

The plague of 1637 visited Eilenburg with severity. The town was overcrowded with fugitives from the country districts. In one year, some 8,000 persons died, including ministerial colleagues. At one point he was the only pastor left in his town and conducted as many as fifty funerals in one day. In his three decades of ministry, he buried more than 4,000 persons.

The plague was followed by a severe famine. One historian recorded that thirty or forty persons could be seen fighting in the streets for a dead cat or crow. Pastor Rinkart gave away everything, but the barest rations for his own family. Despite his life of tremendous sacrifice in response to crises in his community, history remembers him for writing the hymn of praise, “Now Thank We All Our God.”

The pandemic COVID-19 presents Christians with many opportunities to suffer and respond with the spirit of Jesus. We must resist the public response of self-preservation and exploiting the vulnerable. What about patronizing Chinese businesses that some are avoiding due to stereotyping. Among other things, I have been sharing music videos that encourage faith and reduce fear.

Hopefully, we will never have another pandemic like this one in our lifetime. If only for this reason, we should never let this crisis go to waste.