By JOANNE BUTLER
In every Christmas season we hear good words about kindness, mercy, and love. But this year is different. This year is a plague year.
Although a COVID vaccine is becoming available, there’s a vicious war over who will have access to it. While there’s general agreement that healthcare workers should be at the front of the vaccination line, there’s a battle over who will be in the succeeding cohorts. Teachers? Elderly people? First responders?
Particularly, how do we, as followers of Jesus Christ, address this issue? Because if we fail to have a Christ-like approach, the utilitarians among us will make the decisions.
Adherents of utilitarianism look at the relative worth of things and (yes) people. A utilitarian would question the wisdom of supplying an octogenarian with a vaccine, as that person’s earning capacity is near zero, when compared to someone who’s middle-aged and in their peak earning years.
For example, a friend recently sent me a copy of a letter purported to be from a woman who was angry that her 40-something husband could not receive immediate surgery to remove a tumor from his kidney. The reason cited was the hospital’s being filled with COVID patients. The writer declared it was unfair to delay her husband’s treatment by three months while providing treatment to aged people who were going to die soon anyway.
This purported letter was zinging through Twitter to provoke similar outrage among its readers. The letter’s dark side is its textbook example of insidious utilitarianism. At its root is a desire to sort access to medical care by age — with the elderly deemed “less worthy” of care than younger workers.
Consider people with Down syndrome. Should they be denied access to the vaccine? People with this condition tend to have shorter-than-average lifespans, and lower wage earnings. A utilitarian just might put the Down syndrome population in the same basket as the octogenarians.
The lesson is: It’s easy to adopt the Christian virtues of kindness, mercy, and love when times are good. We are tested by God when times are tough.
We know God understands our suffering because via His conception and Incarnation He came into our physical world, with its panoply of beauty and ugliness, health and sickness, youth and age, life and death. Unlike the gods of other religions, our God entered human time and space; true God and true Man. Note that, as Almighty God, He did not need to share the human experience, but He did so anyway out of love for us.
Our God was, at times, tired, hungry, and lonely. He wept at Lazarus’ tomb while some chided Him for arriving too late to prevent the man’s death (John 11:35-38).
Imagine what might have happened if utilitarian thinking (an Enlightenment concept) had been in men’s minds at that time. Utilitarians might have chided Jesus for resurrecting Lazarus, complaining how a chronically ill man dependent on his sisters for his living was not worth the bother.
The Incarnation of Jesus Christ proves to us that every human person is worth the bother! Just as Mary and Joseph held the hands of the Infant Jesus, so He invites us to hold His sacred hands, as His brothers and sisters. We need to remember how Jesus underwent suffering and death for our redemption — without regard to age or social status. Likewise we should pray for those who are making decisions in this pandemic era that they will be guided by our Lord’s charity and hold fast to the belief that every life is sacred.
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