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“Thorns and thistles” the ground would produce, God told Adam after the fall (Gen. 3:18). I suggested in my sermon this past week that perhaps the coronavirus could be considered a molecular “thorn” and/or a microscopic “thistle.”
The Washington Post ran an intriguing article titled, “The Coronavirus Isn’t Alive. That’s Why It’s So Hard To Kill,”by Sarah Kaplan, William Wan, and Joel Achenbach.
Here are some snippets that caught my attention.
Viruses are “little more than a packet of genetic material surrounded by a spiky protein shell one-thousandth the width of an eyelash.”
Coronaviruses are “named for the protein spikes that adorn them like points of a crown.”
Gary Whittaker, a Cornell University professor of virology, described a virus as being somewhere “between chemistry and biology.”
“There is a certain evil genius to how this coronavirus pathogen works: It finds easy purchase in humans without them knowing. Before its first host even develops symptoms, it is already spreading its replicas everywhere, moving onto its next victim. It is powerfully deadly in some but mild enough in others to escape containment.”
“When viruses encounter a host, they … unlock and invade its unsuspecting cells. Then they take control of those cells’ molecular machinery to produce and assemble the materials needed for more viruses.”
“Once inside a cell, a virus can make 10,000 copies of itself in a matter of hours. Within a few days, the infected person will carry hundreds of millions of viral particles in every teaspoon of his blood.”
“Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at Johns Hopkins University, compared viruses to particularly destructive burglars: ‘They break into your home, eat your food, use your furniture and have 10,000 babies. And then they leave the place trashed.’”
During this Good Friday week, we reflect on how “soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his [Christ’s] head” (John 19:2). Corona is the Latin word for crown. Under the microscope, the virus looks like a thorny crown. While our world is focused on this thorny crown virus, let us as Christians focus upon our Savior, who embraced our sinful state and wore a crown of thorns!
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