Did you know that the word vaccine comes from the Latin vaccinus – pertaining to a cow. You may have learned in school how the deadly virus of its day, smallpox, was overcome by Edward Jenner, a physician noticing that dairy maids didn’t have the tell-tail pox scars. He picked up on a local countryfolk superstition that if you infected yourself with the pus from the cow pox boils on dairy maids’ hands you wouldn’t catch small pox. Jenner experimented (on someone else of course) and published his results, revolutionising the world.
The Old Testament equivalent was a story of when the Israelites were wondering in the wilderness. They were attacked by a plague of deadly serpents. God listened to the suffering of his people and instructed Moses to make a bronze serpent entwined around a stick and place it high, in the middle of the camp. If you were bitten, all you had to do was look to the serpent on a stick and you would live. You might have seen this symbol still used on pharmacies. What you might not know is that it is a symbol of the cross. In John’s gospel, Jesus draws on this image saying that he too will be lifted up to bring life to others.
As we gather for our Patronal festival we remember St Martin who thought he was high and powerful on his horse and high station. God came as the low, the person stripped and without help or friend. The symbol of a man dying on a cross isn’t beautiful; it’s hard to use it as a symbol of power unless you remove the man. And it wasn’t until Martin was weak, incapacitated in sleep, that he could hear God coming to him as strong, enlightening him and changing his life.
This pandemic has made weak and strong out of all of us, no one in the world, world leaders nor monarchs are immune. People look to faith for strength but Christ’s strength is different from a vaccine. Christ isn’t something we can use to make us strong but he is a person who changes the focus of what we thought was high and low. Suddenly to be with the milkmaid, the serpent, the beggar, the dying, naked criminal; to be with our own weakness, letting the love of God of others, even of strangers in, even if it is because we have no covering left, this is the most religious place you can be. It turns out, salvation is found with the God of the weak.
Revd Sally Hitchiner
