The COVID pandemic caught us by surprise. Nothing quite like it ever happened in our lifetime.
Plagues were common in the Middle Ages. Philipp Nicolai (1556-1608) was a pastor in Unma (Germany) when the bubonic plague swept through the town. More than thirteen hundred people died among its twenty-five hundred residents. While other pastors fled, Nicolai stayed behind to care for people, conducting as many as thirty funerals a day. Despite the horrendous pandemic, he wrote The Joyous Mirror of Eternal Life, utilizing Roman 8.18 as his theme verse, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worthy to be compared to the glory to be revealed to us.” He wrote, “Every time we confess the Apostles Creed, we proclaim our belief in eternal life, purchased for us by Christ and promised to us in the Holy Scriptures.” He observed that eternal life not only gives comfort in tribulation and hope to outlast suffering but provides inducement to love in present circumstances.
He included two hymns in his writing, “O Morning Star! How Fair and Bright” and “Wake, Awake, for Night is Flying.” The latter draws on Jesus’ parable of the ten bridesmaids to ready us for Christ’s return. Nicolai tutored fourteen-year-old Wilhelm Ernst who died in the plague. He paid tribute to his fallen student by beginning each hymn verse with Wilhelm’s initials, forming an acrostic. He later wrote a letter about surviving the plague, “Day by day I wrote out my meditations, found myself, thank God, wonderfully well, comforted in heart, joyful in spirit, and truly content; gave to my manuscript the name and title of Mirror of Joy to leave behind me (if God should call me from this world) as the token of peaceful, joyful, Christian departure, or (if God should spare me in health) to comfort other sufferers.”
The last two stanzas of Nicolai’s hymn, “Wake, Awake, for Night is Flying,” often sung during Advent, lead us to pray: