Staying at home to save lives… … and leaving home for lives to be saved.

Stay at home! The message is clear. This is the best thing non-keyworkers can do to save lives: our own and the lives of others.

Some though must leave home and put their own lives at risk to perform the key tasks needed to fight the virus and keep us safe and supplied with essentials. We are so grateful for their selfless devotion to their duties. Sadly, some, who did not have the safer option of staying at home, have already lost their own lives as they fought to save the lives of others.

Christianity rests upon the historical events of Jesus’ actual death and physical resurrection. So, this week that leads up to Easter is a special time for Christians throughout the whole world. Good Friday and Easter Sunday remind us that Jesus could not have performed his work as Saviour by staying at home.

Like our keyworkers, Jesus was thinking of others when he left home. Lives needed to be saved. The virus must be defeated. The ‘virus’ Jesus came to deal with was not coronavirus but sin. The only way for us to be rescued from the danger this ‘virus’ poses to us was for Jesus not to stay at home but to come to die on the cross. He deliberately put himself in harm’s way for others, knowing that it meant, not just the risk of death, but the certainty of death for him. So far, there is no available vaccine for the coronavirus. The good news of Christianity is that Jesus’ death is the cure for sin, and God validated what Jesus achieved on the cross by raising him physically and bodily from the dead.

There is no immediate end to the restrictions that are necessary to protect us all from coronavirus. So, although we find it frustrating and inconvenient, those of us who should, must stay at home.

Yet, there are things we can all do. We can pray that God would heal those who are ill mentally and physically and protect those who are not; comfort those who are grieving; give leaders extra wisdom and the best advice; strengthen all who are on the frontline against Covid-19; give researchers unexpected breakthroughs; and calm our fears and anxiety, filling us, instead, with his hope and peace.

Above everything else, we should trust in Jesus, who left the safety of his home to die so that we can be forgiven and have the certain hope of a home one day in heaven, where we will be safe for ever.