By Wendell Griffen
Two years ago, the term Covid-19 was not part of our vocabulary. Most people would have stumbled in speaking the term “novel coronavirus.” The world had survived bouts with influenza and Ebola virus in prior years. But infectious disease experts, public health officials, physicians, politicians, lawyers, judges, courts, journalists and everyone else in the world did not know about Covid-19. It did not exist in September 2019.
Two years later, Covid-19 defines how we live, move, work, study, worship, entertain and conduct the other rituals of existence from birth through death. What began as a new viral infection in one province in China, spread across that nation, spanned the world in a matter of weeks, and made globalism real in new ways.
Scientists and medical professionals worked harder and faster than ever before to develop a vaccine for this highly infectious, easily transmissible and lethal respiratory virus. A year ago, the best the world could hope was that researchers would succeed in developing, testing, and producing a vaccine by late fall or early winter 2020.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was hospitalized for a week and spent three days in intensive care after he was sickened by Covid 19 in April 2020.Factors that affect the attitude towards acceptance of vaccination include complacency, convenience and confidence. Complacency denotes the low perception of the disease risk; hence, vaccination was deemed unnecessary. Confidence refers to the trust in vaccination safety, effectiveness, besides the competence of the healthcare systems. Convenience entails the availability, affordability, and delivery of vaccines in a comfortable context.See, the Lord’s hand is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. 2Rather, your iniquities have been barriers between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear.
3For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue mutters wickedness.
4No one brings suit justly, no one goes to law honestly; they rely on empty pleas, they speak lies, conceiving mischief and begetting iniquity.
5They hatch adders’ eggs and weave the spider’s web; whoever eats their eggs dies, and the crushed egg hatches out a viper.
6Their webs cannot serve as clothing; they cannot cover themselves with what they make. Their works are works of iniquity, and deeds of violence are in their hands.
7Their feet run to evil, and they rush to shed innocent blood; their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity, desolation and destruction are in their highways.
8The way of peace they do not know, and there is no justice in their paths. Their roads they have made crooked; no one who walks in them knows peace.
9Therefore justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us; we wait for light, and lo! there is darkness; and for brightness, but we walk in gloom.
10We grope like the blind along a wall, groping like those who have no eyes; we stumble at noon as in the twilight, among the vigorous as though we were dead.
11We all growl like bears; like doves we moan mournfully. We wait for justice, but there is none; for salvation, but it is far from us.
12For our transgressions before you are many, and our sins testify against us. Our transgressions indeed are with us, and we know our iniquities:
13transgressing, and denying the Lord, and turning away from following our God, talking oppression and revolt, conceiving lying words and uttering them from the heart.
14Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands at a distance; for truth stumbles in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter.
15Truth is lacking, and whoever turns from evil is despoiled. The Lord saw it, and it displeased him that there was no justice. 16He saw that there was no one, and was appalled that there was no one to intervene; so his own arm brought him victory, and his righteousness upheld him. [New Revised Standard Version]
Another Hebrew prophet analyzed the problem in words that, although different, are similarly indicting:
Micah 2:1-11
1Alas for those who devise wickedness and evil deeds on their beds! When the morning dawns, they perform it, because it is in their power.
2They covet fields, and seize them; houses, and take them away; they oppress householder and house, people and their inheritance. 3Therefore thus says the Lord: Now, I am devising against this family an evil from which you cannot remove your necks; and you shall not walk haughtily, for it will be an evil time. 4On that day they shall take up a taunt song against you, and wail with bitter lamentation, and say, “We are utterly ruined; the Lord alters the inheritance of my people; how he removes it from me! Among our captors he parcels out our fields.” 5Therefore you will have no one to cast the line by lot in the assembly of the Lord. 6“Do not preach” —thus they preach— “one should not preach of such things; disgrace will not overtake us.” 7Should this be said, O house of Jacob? Is the Lord’s patience exhausted? Are these his doings? Do not my words do good to one who walks uprightly? 8But you rise up against my people as an enemy; you strip the robe from the peaceful, from those who pass by trustingly with no thought of war. 9The women of my people you drive out from their pleasant houses; from their young children you take away my glory forever. 10Arise and go; for this is no place to rest, because of uncleanness that destroys with a grievous destruction. 11If someone were to go about uttering empty falsehoods, saying, “I will preach to you of wine and strong drink,” such a one would be the preacher for this people! [New Revised Standard Version]
Professor Allan Boesak has provided an incisive and succinct analysis of the abusive power machinations at work exposed by those passages in the following excerpt from his 2015 book, Kairos, Crisis, and Global Apartheid: The Challenge to Prophetic Resistance:Micah teaches us that prophetic judgment is not emotional ranting and raving. He is meticulous as he lists the evil that those who oppress the poor “love.” They “devise wickedness and evil deeds in their beds,” that is they think of nothing else all night long, and when morning dawns, “they perform it.” This should give us pause. First, Micah offers sober insight into the human psyche: unlike animals reacting on instincts for self-preservation and survival, humans contemplate the evil they wreak upon others. They plan exploitation and oppression; they calculate the profits and benefits of war and destruction. They design the language of justification, obfuscation, and trivialization: “collateral damage,” “enhanced interrogation techniques,” “We tortured some folks.” There is nothing spontaneous about it. Then Micah adds, with amazing insight into the workings of power, ancient and modern, “because it is in their power” (2:1). This is what lies at the core of their evildoing: raw, abusive power. There is no fuzziness, naivete, no ambiguity about this: it is pure, naked, abusive power [Kairos, p. 125].
Politicians in Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and elsewhere oppose vaccine mandates knowing that such mandates are lawful. They know hospitals in their states have intensive care units filled with unvaccinated and intubated Covid-19 patients. Those politicians are now planning lawsuits and other maneuvers to challenge vaccine mandates. They are designing and fabricating public appearances where they falsely blame vaccine mandates for vaccine hesitancy. And they are doing it, as Micah observed and as Boesak emphasized, because it is in their power.
Likewise, so-called Christian conservative religious leaders oppose vaccine mandates knowing that religious exemptions are provided, knowing that the option of weekly testing for Covid is an alternative to being vaccinated, and knowing that employers are obligated to make reasonable accommodations for persons who object to being vaccinated on religious grounds. As with the politicians, those religious leaders oppose the vaccine mandates and foment opposition to efforts to encourage compliance with the mandates because it is in their power.
The conduct of those politicians and religious leaders goes beyond being simple, scornful and foolish. It is more than hypocritical, more than hubristic, and more than arrogant. It is self-righteous, self-serving, and self-worshiping. Simply put, it is diabolical.
It is the special work of prophetic persons to say so. Courts and judges can declare Covid-19 vaccine mandates lawful. Physicians and medical researchers can attest that vaccines for Covid-19 are safe and effective. Physicians and nurses can administer the vaccines. But the work of exposing, denouncing and condemning the diabolical conduct of politicians and religious leaders who are falsely opposing vaccine mandates belongs to prophetic people.
Hence, Allan Boesak draws our attention to the repeated denunciation of hypocrites by Jesus in Matthew 23 where one reads these words:
Matthew 23:23-33
23“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. 24You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!
25“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean.
27“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. 28So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.
29“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous, 30and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ 31Thus you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets. 32Fill up, then, the measure of your ancestors. 33You snakes, you brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell? [New Revised Standard Version]
Boesak, a prophetic scholar, preacher and activist, observes that, therefore, such hypocrisy is never “harmless,” and reminds us:
“That is one reason why Jesus, in Matt 23, so repeatedly called the Jerusalem elites who held the power of life or death over the heads of the vulnerable, "hypocrites." Hypocrisy is not simply "a face we put on." What we are hiding, Jesus says, looking at this through the eyes of hypocrisy's victims, is a calculated, lethal intent; a choice to turn away from the God of life to the gods of death. Hypocrisy=idolatry=service to Moloch=human sacrifice, especially and specifically children.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/17/boris-johnson-and-coronavirus-inside-story-illness.