To my Christian Facebook friends (the rest of you don’t have to read this)

I don’t understand some of you. Some of you are saying that you are not going to wear masks when you are out around people, it violates your constitutional rights, you don’t have to, somehow some of you tie it up with religious freedom.

Have you so quickly forgotten who you are, who you follow?

Have you forgotten that he wore a crown of thorns for you (Mark 15)? That like a lamb before it’s shearers is dumb, when he was being brutalized and killed he didn’t open his mouth? (Isaiah 53)

Have you forgotten that though he was God (which gives him a whole lot more rights than what’s in the constitution) he didn’t consider those rights as something to be grasped but emptied himself and took on himself the form of a servant and humbled himself unto death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2)

Have you forgotten that God loved you so much that he gave his only begotten Son to die a painful hard death so that you would not perish but have eternal life? (John 3:16)

Have you forgotten that that Jesus the night before he died told us he wanted us to love one another the way he loved us? (John 13)

Have you forgotten that he said the main principle of his kingdom’s constitution was to love God above all things and to love your neighbor as yourself? (Matthew 22:34-40)

And you won’t wear a mask so that maybe just one other person won’t get horribly sick and maybe die?

WWJD? Would Jesus wear a mask?

Well, let’s see, he gave up all his rights, put on a crown, took our selfish sin upon himself and died. And if it had only been for you, he would have still done it.

Yes, I think he would have worn a mask because Jesus is not about freedom, he is about love, about loving you. And love does not insist on having its own way but freely does what is best for the other (1 Corinthians 13). Even just one other, even just you.

I think he would have put on a mask for just my brother-in-law if it meant that he wouldn’t run the risk of infecting Craig with COVID-19 and watching him die. Did I tell you how much Craig went through? How long he struggled, on a ventilator, in ICU? How he died alone? How hard all of this was and is on his family? Jesus did a whole lot more for Craig, I am pretty sure he would have put on a mask. And then there are all those 120,000 others or more who are going to die the same kind of painful death. Would Jesus love them enough to wear a mask?! Will you?

And that’s not even the question. The real question is who are you and who do you follow? Are you an American with rights and privileges OR Are you a Christian? Will you follow Jesus and lay down your rights out of love for Christ and the one other person who might be spared pain and death because you coughed into your mask and not into their face? Or not.

It’s time to decide. American or Christian? And make no mistake, that question seems to be getting ever more critical to answer. If you’re a Christian, you know about judgment day and the signs of the end and the coming of Jesus. You know about the earthquakes and famines and locusts and plagues and crazy weather and the insects that bite with such pain people wish they could die and about economic collapse and love growing cold. About Christians forsaking their first love and falling away from the way of Christ. You know it’s coming.

Are you really going to stand up in front of the Judge surrounded by all those others who died in this pandemic and say, “it was my constitutional right to not put that mask on, to cough in their face and watch them die.”

Or will you hear Jesus say, “well done, good and faithful servant.” 

It’s time to decide.