Mary Montagu was an English aristocrat, writer, and poet, born in 1689. In 1712 she had married Edward Montagu who later served as the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. During the two years accompanying her husband she wrote extensively about her Ottoman excursion.  Mary is known for introducing and advocating for smallpox inoculation to Britain after her return from Turkey. The idea involved infecting a host with a weakened form of the antigens so that the body could generate antibodies which would help it fight the disease. She, of course, new nothing of the microbiology that would be later discovered via Edward Jennings work with cow pox. However, this was her ‘theory’ which she had observed during her stay in the Ottoman Empire and residence in Constantinople. She had to prove it. In March 1718, Mary offered her son Edward to be inoculated and she infected him with the smallpox virus, and he recovered.

Lady Mary is today chiefly remembered for her letters, particularly her Turkish Embassy Letters describing her travels to the Ottoman Empire, as wife to the British ambassador to Turkey. She is described as “the very first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient.” She died of cancer in 1762.

Around the same time that Mary was advocating her ‘cure’, it came to public attention in the American colonies. Enslaved West Africans had long practiced the same technique, and after his slave Onesimus told him about how it worked in 1716, Cotton Mather publicized it and argued for its use in response to a 1721 outbreak of smallpox in Massachusetts.

It wasn’t until May 1796 that the world’s first vaccine was demonstrated, using the same principle, but with a less dangerous viral source, cowpox. Having heard of local beliefs and practices in rural communities that cowpox protected against smallpox, Dr Edward Jenner inoculated 8-year-old James Phipps with matter from a cowpox sore on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a local milkmaid.

Phipps reacted to the cowpox matter and felt unwell for several days but made a full recovery. Two months later, in July 1796, Jenner took matter from a human smallpox sore and inoculated Phipps with it to test his resistance. Phipps remained in perfect health, the first person to be vaccinated against smallpox.

Not everyone was on board with Jenner and his vaccine. Rumours circulated at the time that it would turn people into cows. But by 1801, through extensive testing, it was shown to effectively protect against smallpox. The vaccine was soon in use on other continents. Vaccination programs were established. Mandatory smallpox vaccination came into effect in Britain and parts of the United States of America in the 1840s and 1850s, as well as in other parts of the world, leading to the establishment of smallpox vaccination certificates required for travel.

While some European regions eliminated the disease by 1900, smallpox was still ravaging continents and areas under colonial rule, with over 2 million people dying every year. It took another 50 years to achieve global solidarity in the fight against the disease.

Today smallpox is eradicated.

Notice how the disease was the very thing that pointed to a cure. By now we are all familiar with the corona virus and all the different forms it has taken over the last decade or more. But let me tell you about a viral outbreak of a different sort, that has rapidly spread through its host community – humanity.  It’s more infectious than Corona, more widespread than influenza and more fatal than Ebola.  It is the virus of human brokenness that smothers all hope. But the good news, is that God has a cure.

Pretty much in every culture, people understand and largely accept that we should live the way the ten commandments outline. But of course, most cultures know that the main reason for all misery in the world is that we and societies don’t. So, what is it that’s wrong with us that breaks down trust and relationships between individuals and in community? The sin ‘virus’ causes us to seek after things other than God.

The Bible helps us understand it through metaphors. In Genesis, sin is described as a predator, crouching down, curled up. In Mark 8 Jesus framed it as like leaven (yeast). In 1 Peter 2, the metaphor has sin being as a battle within us.

Today, sin is like a virus. Understanding viruses can lead us to the single cure described in Scripture. Firstly, a virus starts small, a single host, but spreads rapidly to cause harm.  Virus’ are coded for destruction. They are often confused with bacteria. But bacteria, which can cause disease, can also be helpful in our gut and in nature. In any one moment we all have more bacteria inside and on us than there are humans on the planet. Viruses are about 500 times smaller. If a bacterium was the size of the Sydney opera house, a typical virus would be the size of a matchbox. Unlike bacteria, viruses are not living, they are just complex particles, and they are ALWAYs harmful.  At the end of WWI, a strain of the flu virus, Spanish Flu, killed 100 million people, more than the whole of the war. These virus particles are a string of genes that are programed to destroy life and that’s why they are excellent analogies for sin.

So how does the pathology of virus relate to the theology of sin? In short, we replace virus with sin in Romans 5. E.g., v12: “Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death came to all people, because all sinned.”

The disease was the very thing that points to a cure. Just as Adam pointed to Jesus. As v14 says; the one who got us into this, also points ahead to the One who will get us out of it.

Adam brought the infection to his descendants, but God brought a remedy to all humanity.  Jesus took away the consequences of the virus of sin. God offered himself as an antibody to the sin virus, because he took the disease on himself, Jesus infected himself with sin, my sin, your sin and beat it. That’s the gospel in medical terminology.

Viral diseases have ripple effects. From one tiny particle, like Adam to all of humanity, and the ripple spread – and none of us is immune. Just as none of us are immune to the ripple effect of sin – the hopelessness caused by the viral effect of human brokenness.

But we do have the ultimate cure; the one who suffered the death that was ours so that we might receive the life that was His. Thanks be to God!