Jesus is My Vaccine?

The concept “Jesus is my vaccine” gets a lot of bad press. It is a mantra for some with fundamentalists or prosperity Christians who preach the health and wealth gospel. I found this song ridiculing the idea against the backdrop of some song claiming Jesus will keep believers free from harm (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MthVGsirxhM). And to be fair, I don’t blame the creator of the video; the way “Jesus is my vaccine” is employed is appalling. Some prominent Christians preach such a message, repudiating Covid as a minor threat, and if it is, they assume that because they are Christians, Jesus will protect them from the vaccine.

Of course, these so-called Christians are utterly flawed in their theology. They have not realized that the gospel propounded by Jesus, Paul, Peter, and the other early Christians, is not a health and wealth gospel. They never said, “if you become a Christian, you will be protected by right by Jesus from the sufferings of life.”

Instead, they preached, “If you become a Christian, you will go through the same sufferings all humans go through (for we are all subject to decay, death, and sinful tendencies), and you will sometimes go through more (persecution and the struggle of being a Christian). But as you go through the suffering, God will be with you! He will be in you. You will be in him. He will strengthen you! And, in the life to come, you will live forever free of suffering. Jesus died to save us, but not to magically protect us, as if he is an antidote to the normal suffering of life. Jesus is our vaccine, but not in the sense these people say.”

Indeed, the failure of the fundamentalist or health and wealth “gospel” is evidenced by the billions of Christians who litter the graveyards of the world since Jesus and the apostles walked the earth. They died from all the same things other humans died from (and many from persecution, including Jesus and some first Christians). These Christians adopt and preach a hideous false gospel that distorts the faith. Paul wrote 2 Corinthians against such people, and he spends large parts of the letter, boasting of his sufferings! In them, he identified with Christ, and he experienced God’s power sustaining him and empowering him in his ministry. I encourage all captured by these false ideas to read 2 Corinthians, memorize it, and apply it.

Yet even though “Jesus is my vaccine” is utterly mangled by some today, the idea is not stupid at one level. It helps us understand the Christian message in broad terms.

The Christian story tells of God creating the first humans and placing them in a garden where they had access to eternal life and to be free of suffering. The fruit of the “Tree of life” would function effectively as a vaccine against their decaying and dying. They would be immune to decay and death.

Of course, the first humans, we read in Genesis 3, rejected God’s injunctions and chose the path of self-determination, and were shut out from the “vaccine” that is the fruit of the Tree. They were infected with sin, corruption, decay, and death (the universal condition).

After this, all people, as we descended from these first people, as Paul puts it, are subject to decay and destined for death. There is no way this can be avoided. Humans are born; they live to a point at which they begin to die. We call the process aging. Then, we all die (fundies and prosperity gospel people included). Paul attributes this problem to a blend of Adam and our own sin and sees it as a universal problem.

In other words, we are fatally sick as humans, most of us declining from those heady days of being in our early-mid-twenties (for some earlier!) until we shuffle off this mortal coil. This is a universal problem, including fundamentalists and prosperity teachers, millions of whom died in times past when their bodies gave up.

The Christian message is that Jesus is our vaccine (but not in the way these people say). At Christmas, we celebrate Jesus’ coming. He was born a vulnerable wee boy, placed in an animal’s feeding trough. He grew to adulthood and lived a life free from sin, utterly fulfilling God’s law given to Israel, and he, too, died. He died a horrible death. Even though he was not infected with the virus of his own personal sin, he allowed himself to be infected with the human condition and with the sins of humankind (metaphorically speaking), and his body decayed and died. This expiry was quick, as his body gave up the ghost, and he died as he was crucified.

The early Christians had experiences of him appearing after this death and became fully convinced that he had overcome death (see the resurrection accounts in the NT). This means he defeated the virus of death, rose to life, appeared, ascended to the right hand of God in our Creator’s realm, heaven, and now reigns the universe as Lord. He became the vaccine or antidote to sin, where faith in God and his Son is found in the human heart.

Where people believe in this Jesus, the vaccine or antidote for sin, God, through Christ, sends his Spirit into the beings of believers. Put another way by Paul, believers are swept up into Christ, and his death becomes our death, and we are promised eternal life.

The Spirit functions as a vaccine in a sense. Where the fundamentalists and prosperity people go wrong is they think the Spirit is in us to the point of completely protecting us from Covid or any other illness for that matter (and poverty, etc.)—if we just have enough faith. Yet, the NT is clear, believers receive the Spirit as a kind of seal, guarantee, birth certificate, or first-fruit of a harvest. The Spirit does not magically protect us from decay and death, but the Spirit strengthens us in our inner beings as we decay and death. The Spirit enables us to persevere, develops our character, enhances our abilities and gives us new gifts and skills, gives us hope, and fills us with love, as we live our mortal lives. The Spirit enables us to live the life God wants for us, despite the virus of sin, decay, and death still eventually killing us.

Paul also explains at different points that while the Spirit is not the vaccine that stops us from decaying and dying in this life, when we die, by this same Spirit, God, through his Son, will raise us from the death. He becomes our vaccine in the most total sense of completely protecting us from decay and death, enabling us never to die again. We will experience the fullness of the Spirit and the gift of resurrected immortal, imperishable life. At that point, Jesus becomes the full dose of the vaccine that these deluded so-called Christians believe they have received now (when they have only received “a small dose”).

So, Jesus is our vaccine, as is the Spirit (who is God and Christ in us). However, he is not our vaccine in the magical sense that these people suggest. He is our vaccine in the sense of strengthening us to go on believing and living the life God has for us, despite suffering and eventually death. At our death, or when Jesus returns (whichever comes first), Jesus by his Spirit will become our eternal vaccine by the Spirit by which we live forever with God—and it will be good!

The final two chapters of Revelation speak of this. The world is renewed, freed from the illness caused by sin, corruption, decay, and death, and people again have access to the Tree of Life that lines the banks of the River of Life that flows from the throne of God. The leaves of this Tree are the healing of the nations. The faithful given the gift of continued life in this renewed world are free to eat of the trees and will live forever (immune to the virus caused by sin).

In sum, the people I have referenced who claim the name Christian should stop preaching a false gospel that “Jesus is my vaccine” in the sense that he will save us in the present from all manner of illnesses, including Covid-19. They can reject the vaccine because they don’t need it. This is rubbish. Covid-19 is real and has taken at the point of writing some six million lives (including many who believed, “Jesus is my vaccine and will save me from Covid”). This kind of thinking is not a biblical understanding. Instead, IMHO, unless they are medically exempt, Christians should take the Covid vaccine just as they have received God’s ultimate vaccine, the Spirit.

However, let us remember that Jesus is my vaccine in the sense that he is the answer to the problem of the sickness caused by sin that manifests in people with all manner of selfishness, greed, idolatries, disruptive, and malicious behavior—and other horrible things we humans do (even the best of us). When we believe, he does send into us the Spirit of God and Christ—the Vaccine of God. He comes into our inner beings—and he dwells in us, and we dwell in him. While he will not magically protect us from sickness (although sometimes he chooses to intervene and do so as he wills), he will be with us strengthening us through our suffering (which is inevitable). He will sustain us if we get Covid, and if it kills us, as it may, he will be there waiting on the other side and will fill us with the Vaccine of God, Christ’s Spirit, and we will live eternally.

Hence, we can get through this pandemic. We don’t have to preach a fake version of the biblical gospel. We can preach the one we find across the NT. It tells us that when humans were blighted by the virus of sin, decay, death, and destruction, God sent Jesus to save us. He never sinned. He died, rose, and is now Lord. He sends his Spirit, the ultimate Vaccine, to deal with the problem of sin and its consequences once and for all. We receive it. We experience his power to strengthen us, even as the virus of sin, decay, and death eventually takes us. And then, glory be!, we live forever filled with the vaccine that is God, in Christ, by the Spirit forever and ever, Amen.

Have a blessed Christmas as we remember that day when Jesus became one of us to save us from the virus of sin and death. He became a vulnerable baby. He took onto himself all that we experience, and in his short life, overcame the virus of sin with which we are infected. He died and rose, and yes, Jesus is our Vaccine. I do hope you dare to believe in him. I fully believe him to be true! Why not taste and see that the Vaccine is good?