Christ among refugees and migrants at Christmas, part 1

There has been a lot of scrambling for the moral high ground in response to the “far right activist” Tommy Robinson’s campaign to put “Christ back into Christmas.”

One UK based network of churches states: “Christ is self-sacrificial love. Christmas is a celebration of the moment that love entered into the world as a vulnerable human child.”

This is a sentimentalisation of the stories in Matthew and Luke. The birth of Jesus has no doubt been co-opted by the hard right as part of a strategy of resistance to what the Trump administration has called “civilisational erasure.” But it has also been co-opted by the soft religious left in support of a moral agenda that fails to grasp the complexity and seriousness of the crisis.

You might like to read what Jason Clark, John Clifton, and David Robertson have to say for a balancing, if not more balanced, perspective.

The thing is, nothing actually enters the world in the Christmas stories. A child is born, conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, and all the signs are that he will become Israel’s king at a time of great national danger, attracting homage and tribute from the nations. The child is vulnerable not because he represents an unprecedented self-sacrificial love that extends to all but because he is seen as a threat to the Herodian régime. So the family become political refugees briefly in Egypt.

The message of the angels to the lowly shepherds outside Bethlehem is that this child, born in the city of David, will be the anointed Lord who will deliver Israel from the corrupt political and religious elites in Jerusalem (Lk. 2:8-14). This is good news for the righteous in Israel—people like Zechariah and Elizabeth, Simeon and the prophetess Anna—with whom YHWH is well pleased.

So Christmas is not about love, it is about kingdom, and in that respect at least the Christian nationalists—no doubt unwittingly—have a better grasp of the New Testament than the churches.

In John’s Gospel it is not love but the “word” that becomes flesh. In effect, the creative wisdom of God finally gets traction in Israel at the moment of Jesus’ baptism—not his birth, about which nothing is said in the Prologue—and will be worked out controversially through the conflicts with his Jewish enemies.

There is quite a lot said about love in John’s Gospel, but it is love expressed almost entirely between Father, Son, and disciples. Yes, God loved the world and sent his Son, but only so that those who believed in him might not be condemned and might enter the life of the age to come (Jn. 3:14-18). There is no subsequent mission of love and compassion to the world.

Love for neighbours and enemies

In a similar vein, a number of Christian leaders wrote a letter expressing their concerns about Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally earlier in the year. They said:

The cross is the ultimate sign of sacrifice for the other. Jesus calls us to love both our neighbours and our enemies and to welcome the stranger. Any co-opting or corrupting of the Christian faith to exclude others is unacceptable.

Again, I think that this reflects a theologically or ideologically inspired misreading of the New Testament.

The cross is understood in the New Testament to be a sacrifice not for an abstract, post-colonial “other” but, specifically and concretely, for Israel, alienated from and hostile towards YHWH. While we Jews were weak, Paul says, “Christ died for the ungodly”; while we Jews were sinners, “Christ died for us”; while we Jews were enemies, “we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Rom. 5:6-10).

This expression of the love of God for his people becomes an “ultimate sign,” we may say, for the persecuted apostles and churches as they bear witness to the coming government of Israel’s God over the nations and, in the process, are transformed into the image of the suffering, martyred, and resurrected Christ. It is nowhere interpreted, I think, as a sign of sacrificial love for the “other.”

Jesus’ teaching about enemies and neighbours in the sermon on the mount has in view Jews, not gentiles. Jewish Law demands an eye for an eye (Matt. 5:38), but Jesus tells them not to resist the Jew who exploits or harms them. In fact, the Law already cautions against hating the hostile fellow Jew:

You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbour, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the LORD. (Lev. 19:17-18)

It does not have to be a gentile who slaps one of Jesus’ disciples across the face, sues for a tunic, compels him or her to carry goods, begs and borrows (Matt. 5:39-42). Jesus’ enemies in the Gospels are always Jews, never Romans.

There is no inclusion of non-Jewish outsiders in his teaching and practice. He determinedly includes the lost sheep of the house of Israel—those neglected or despised by the political and religious elites.

He begrudgingly heals one or two gentiles, but the lesson learned is for Israel only. Is that sufficient basis for the church’s insistence on the uncontrolled inclusion of refugees and migrants?

The mission is not to include. Jesus brings not peace but the sword (Matt. 10:34). The mission is to divide Israel between those who hear and those who do not hear the message about the coming catastrophe of divine intervention. The disciples are sent exclusively to the lost sheep of the house of Israel; they proclaim the imminence of the kingdom of God, performing the signs that will back up their claim. Some villagers will welcome them; others will refuse to listen to their words, and “it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town” (Matt. 10:15).

If we are going to put Christ back into Christmas, let’s at least make sure it is the right Christ.

I was a stranger and you welcomed me

When the Son of Man judges the nations to whom his disciples are sent, he will say to some gentiles, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matt 25:35). Is he saying here that “how we treat strangers indicates whether we are His followers”? Is he saying that as his disciples, “we are to invite the stranger in”?

Certainly not directly. He is saying rather that those righteous people, perhaps principally Jews, who received “the least of these my brothers” as they went among the nations proclaiming the coming kingdom of God, would be included in the new order. He identifies not with the generic migrant but with his ill-treated disciples (cf. Acts 9:4-5).

The writer to the Hebrews urges his readers not to neglect hospitality (Heb. 13:2). The word philoxenia may carry connotations of hospitality towards strangers, but it is presented as an example of “brotherly love” (philadelphia): they are to care for their fellow believers in Jesus, even if they are strangers to them; they are to attend to the needs of those brothers who are in prison or are mistreated. Paul says much the same: “Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality (philoxenian)” (Rom. 12:13).

Migration in the New Testament

The experience of migration in the New Testament can be overstated, as in this article on “Migration and Christian Theology” by Ilsup Ahn in the St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology. Apart from the brief stay in Egypt as a child, Jesus moved around within Israel in the course of his ministry much as anyone else would have done—workers in search of employment, people travelling to Jerusalem for the festivals, staying with family and friends. It can hardly be said that “Jesus and his ministry were deeply entangled with the experience of migration.” If Jesus experienced ostracism and isolation, it was among his own people, not as a foreigner or “other”:

Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offence at him. (Mk. 6:3)

That Matthew speaks of Jesus frequently withdrawing (anachōreō) to remote areas to avoid trouble, marks him out as a controversial public figure, not as a refugee or migrant.

Ahn says that “By becoming ‘the other’ as a Divine Migrant, Jesus also demonstrates that the inclusion of the other lies at the heart of his ministry in this world.” Moreover, this inclusiveness becomes the “key missional goal in the ministries of Jesus’ disciples.” But the question at the heart of John’s Gospel is not whether Jesus and his disciples embrace the other; it is whether Israel would embrace or include Jesus (Jn. 1:9-13).

It is, of course, true that the churches of the Pauline mission were radically inclusive, but in a radically exclusive fashion: Paul set the confessional and ethical bar very high (cf. 1 Cor. 6:9-10). The churches were radical eschatological communities called out as witnesses to an impending judgment against the Jew first, and then the Greek. Their inclusiveness was a sign that the God of Israel was the God of all peoples and all classes of people (e.g., Rom. 3:29), but neither the Jews nor the gentiles are censured for failing to include. The churches do not model a society with no internal or external boundaries.

None of this means that it is wrong to be compassionate and welcoming towards migrants. Of course not. But in making it less obviously a systematic biblical obligation, we are allowed to step back and assess the matter more pragmatically.

Ah, but what about the experience of the sojourner in the Old Testament? Doesn’t that put migration at the heart of the biblical story? I think we may find in part two of this contrary study that the sojourner paradigm cuts both ways.