Jesus, King of Strangers

What the Bible Really Says about Immigration

Mark W. Hamilton

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781467457897
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Recovering the church's native language for migrants

Nationalistic tribalism is on the rise around the world. How we treat strangers (foreigners, immigrants, migrants) is a promi­nent political, economic, and religious issue. Drawing on his personal experiences and expertise as a biblical scholar, Mark Hamilton argues that Scripture describes God's people as strangers who are called to show grace and hospitality to others.

The church has often identified itself as a community of strangers. This was the story of the church during much of its early history. In many parts of the world, it still is. In a world in which 240 million persons are voluntary immigrants and another 60 to 70 million are refugees, the urgency of the church's recovery of its native language on immigration remains vital. Jesus, King of Strangers examines the Bible's key ideas about human movement and the relationship between migrants and their hosts. Hamilton argues that reclaiming the biblical language will free the church from hypernationalism and fear-driven demagoguery.

CHAPTER 1

The Reality of Migration

MOVEMENT, ALONG WITH FOOD, water, and shelter, remains one of the constants of human existence. Our remotest ancestors apparently moved out of Africa and filled every continent except Antarctica. The gene pools of the species flow more like rivulets, intertwined and ever-moving. None of us stands still for long.

Today, of course, movement takes many forms, within and among nations. Our fellow humans migrate for complex reasons: pursuit of further education, hope for better jobs, and a desire to escape war, famine, or persecution. In most cases, because leaving one’s home culture poses many challenges, a migrant must feel both a push and a pull. It becomes difficult to identify precise motives.

For example, a few years ago the Perez family moved to my central Texas city from Mexico after a gang kidnapped Rafael, the father, and tried to extort protection money from his small drugstore business.¹ Receiving no help from the local authorities, he fled to the United States, where he had a few distant church acquaintances. Our diverse, though predominantly Anglo, congregation adopted him, his wife Maria, and their two teenage daughters, Lilia and Zoe, and helped support him while he navigated the labyrinthine process of obtaining a work visa as a religious worker. His older daughter, Lilia, finished high school and entered the university at which I teach. Rafael and Maria served alongside the rest of us, ministering to struggling people in our town, worshiping and fellowshiping with a community that tried to follow Christ’s teachings about our common humanity.

At each step of the immigration process, the Perez family consulted lawyers paid for by members of our congregation. They meticulously followed the advice of their attorney at every turn.

Then the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) decree dropped on their heads. You must leave the country within days. Wrap up work, friendships, service to church members, and teaching the gospel. Go. And so Rafael, Maria, Zoe, and Lilia went. Fortunately, Lilia was able to receive a student visa in Monterey and to return to school, this time without her family. Her sister and parents still wait in Mexico. They broke no laws and contributed their labor and love to a community, and yet in the heightened enforcement of the past two years, they left. Tearful goodbyes, anger mixed with sorrow, affected us, regardless of political persuasion or background or heart language.

Soon after their departure, I was talking with a friend of mine, June, who is ninety-four years old. She grew up on a small West Texas farm, married, became a young widow raising several children, and enjoyed health robust enough for work into her early eighties. Kindhearted yet not one to mince words, she personifies for me the best of the American West with its independence, self-reliance, and compassion. “Why did they make them leave?” she asked about the departure of the Perez family, her indignation palpable. “Aren’t they the kind of people we want coming here?” I thought so too. We all did.

June’s question gets at the heart of much of the immigration debate in the United States and, to some extent, Western Europe. Aren’t these the kinds of people we want coming here? Far from seeing immigrants as a threat, she had learned to see at least one family as a potential asset.

Not everyone sees things this way, of course. American public culture has increasingly come to resemble a row among soccer hooligans in some Western European city. Hardened political positions, denigration of opponents, accusations and counteraccusations seem the order of the day. Knowledge takes a back seat to opinion. Nuance? Don’t bother. Minds are made up or, rather, put on the shelf in locked boxes. The wisdom of my elderly friend seems lost.

It is hard to pin down the causes of this degradation of public discourse, but some of them are clear enough. In their study of the rise of the Tea Party, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson note both positive and negative aspects of perhaps the most visible of those movements that have included hostility to immigration among their mix of issues. As they note, in a blend of admiration and concern, “Grassroots Tea Party activism . . . marries participatory engagement and considerable learning about the workings of government with factually ungrounded beliefs about the content of policies.”² That’s academic-speak for “people know how to get what they want but don’t know why they want it.” The lack of empathy for vulnerable people outside our sphere of family and friends threatens the identity of our churches as explicitly Christian communities.

They further observe something many of us have noticed in churches that contain large numbers of very conservative members: “Another paradox of Tea Party citizenship is the sharp bifurcation between generous, tolerant interaction within the group, and an almost total lack of empathy or sympathy for fellow Americans beyond the group.”³ This observation, heavily grounded in empirical research, expresses a paradox that Skocpol and Williamson and many of the rest of us have puzzled over.

The puzzlement certainly increased during the 2016 election season, when a large majority of white evangelicals who voted chose a man whose personal morals, style of communication, and ideas about the dignity of other human beings sit crosswise with Christianity in almost every respect. Many of us inside the church who had known of Donald Trump for years as a playboy and reality television personality were astonished that his transgressive lifestyle and mode of communication could find a home within the church itself. It seems impossible to square his rhetoric with the numerous statements in the New Testament about how we should communicate with each other and how we should shape our own lives. Many of us have felt betrayed by religious leaders who have justified acceptance of his policies (to the extent that his ideas of governance can be dignified with such a label) by appealing to the old shibboleths of the culture wars of the 1970s. Many of us think that a day of reckoning will have to come, and come soon.

Part of that transgressive rhetoric concerns immigration. Here the violation of basic norms of truth-telling and even decency has become commonplace. Naming immigrants as murderers and rapists, using the long arm of the state to crush weak people, holding the young people of DACA hostage to a misguided policy of wall building—all of these behaviors show not a strong leader but a very weak one. They do not make America great again, for they are the behavior not of a statesman but of a gangster. And yet many Americans, including many Christians, accept such rhetoric as simply part of the cost of doing business.

So Skocpol and Williamson can rightly point to a breathtaking lack of respect for the facts and an equally profound lack of empathy for anyone outside the in-group as key factors in this politics. (In fairness, the same qualities seem to appear in parts of the Left as well.) And they are surely right to add, as those of us who love the church must acknowledge, that part of the motives of the Right has a connection to some expressions of Christianity. The survivors of the Religious Right have sometimes found a place in the mix of groups that have supported the proposed immigration “reforms.”

Skocpol and Williamson wrote before the emergence of Donald Trump or the mainstreaming of the overtly racist alt-right that accompanied his rise. The radical transgressiveness of Charlottesville had not yet appeared on the horizon. And we must take seriously their cautions against tarring people with overly broad brushes. Wanting a tax cut does not equal burning crosses. Opposition to universal, government-sponsored health insurance does not make one a sociopath. Worrying about the national debt makes sense, as the experiences of our southern European friends have shown. Yet those of us who object to both the style and substance of the attack on immigrants and many others should state clearly what we think is at stake, not least for the church’s life.

In truth, this struggle to articulate alternative visions is going on all over American Christianity. While some conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists insist on fighting the culture war of the 1970s to the last ditch, a younger generation of leaders has emerged in evangelicalism to insist on both a different style and different content. They have come to doubt the idea that somehow landing a few congenial judges will radically alter the moral decision-making of large swathes of their fellow Americans. They have sickened of the political grandstanding and power-mongering that has accompanied the Religious Right’s grasp at power. And they ask what any of that has to do with Jesus’s announcement of a kingdom that brought sight to the blind and liberty to the captives.⁴

When Jesus spoke of that kingdom, he did not pull his ideas about it out of thin air. Rather, Jesus and the early church reporting his words and deeds resorted over and over to the older stories and poems of Israel, the texts of the Old Testament. Jesus’s story was Israel’s story.

Such a reality becomes clear in Jesus’s description of the Last Judgment, the moment when God will resolve all the problems of human existence and make justice real. As the First Gospel relates, Jesus represented the great trial scene as an announcement of hope for the righteous and despair for the wicked, with the distinction between the two arising from the fact that the former responded properly to the royal judge. As the great ruler says, “I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me a drink, a stranger [xenos] and you housed me, naked and you clothed me, sick and you nursed me, in prison and you came to me” (Matt. 25:34–36).

Jesus presents the great judge of all, himself, as the king of strangers, the ruler whose concerns extend to the most vulnerable human beings. Far from pursuing the splendors of empire and the approval of the successful, the king of all seeks the vulnerability of the prisoner, the empty stomach and shivering limbs of the poor. And he rewards those human beings who go beyond the illusions of success to the reality of human misery and the possibilities for its relief.

Conversely, the wicked neglect these acts of human kindness. Jesus’s criteria for eternal salvation do not come out of nowhere. This is the point. As the king of the prisoner, the hungry, and the migrant, he simply repeats the concerns of Israel’s entire history of moral reflection, as evidenced in the Bible itself.

This book reflects just such concerns. Here I hope to present a Christian viewpoint that both accurately represents Scripture’s teachings about migrants and their hosts and invites non-Christians to engage in a mutually respectful moral discourse about political issues that matter. As my friend June says, “Aren’t these the people we want here?”

What Do We Know?

So we should start with what we know. In their 2018 report, the United Nations and the International Organization for Migration noted that, as of 2015, about 244 million persons live in a country other than the one of their birth, making immigration a major force in today’s world.⁵ Many of these migrants enjoy improved prosperity, safety, and good health care in their host countries. In 2016 they sent back home $575 billion, three times the amount of formal foreign aid, in order to help families and friends.⁶ This transfer of funds and knowledge elevates families, communities, and nations. At the same time, many others live outside the law and fall victim to the predations of human traffickers, dishonest employers, and corrupt officials. Indeed, the customary distinctions made for immigration—free versus unfree, laborers versus refugees, legitimate movements versus vagrancy—prove difficult to apply in concrete cases.⁷

In addition to these quarter of a billion migrants, refugees and internally displaced persons constitute a different and rapidly growing group. According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, the world’s number of forced migrants motivated by war or governmental oppression grew from 38 million in 2000 to just under 60 million in 2014, not the sort of growth industry anyone would welcome.⁸ About 22.5 million of those persons have crossed international borders, putting them into the complex systems for refugees and asylum seekers. Absent sufficient resources, most of these persons live in nearby countries, making refugee crises a regional phenomenon, in part. Less than 1 percent of such refugees permanently resettle in a new country. And since economic development, always intertwined with governmental stability, has advanced furthest in areas most distant from such catastrophic conflicts, refugees often land in many of the poorest countries in the world. The fraying of international infrastructure in an era of nationalistic competition renders the overall situation precarious at best.

The complexity and seeming hopelessness of the situation drift across our television screens or internet feeds in the videos of European coast guards rescuing sinking boats in the Mediterranean. Thanks to adventuresome journalists and the work of organizations like Doctors Without Borders, we have become more aware of the plight of Africans and Middle Easterners caught in the web of movement spun by warlords and smugglers, on one side, and the still functioning civil societies that must decide how to do good with limited resources and inadequate knowledge, on the other. Borders and the national identities they symbolize and reinforce seem increasingly airy and unreal.

However, the attempt to make them real has occupied politicians on both Left and Right since the eighteenth century, at least. Following the end of the European wars of religion in 1648, powers on that subcontinent created what is often called the Westphalian system (named for the Treaty of Westphalia ending the Thirty Years’ War). In this political scheme, all states defend clearly defined borders, and everyone lives inside a state, of which he or she is a citizen. (Pirates, castaways, and itinerant billionaires offer the major exceptions to the rule.) Persons move not from village to village or even province to province, but from one carefully circumscribed state to another. Since borders are ideological constructs as much as physical ones, movements across them frighten or excite those on the other side, often triggering political movements or driving populations to decide to isolate themselves, even contrary to their own rationally considered self-interest. Brexit, anyone?

Crucially, the choices frighten and excite come from the underlying conditions of the host country. Australia or Canada, for example, can welcome large-scale immigration as a percentage of their overall population in part because their vast landscapes lack people to fill them. In more densely populated regions, such as Western Europe or the United States, the backlash against immigrants, refugees, and their advocates has intensified thanks to both social pressures and the work of politicians on the make. The stories of individuals and families fade into the background before the grand narratives of nationhood, which always require a menacing “other” powerful enough to threaten but weak enough to be defeated.

In a situation so charged with structural conflict and individual opportunity, escaping the trap of binary thinking about one’s own group and the “other” requires more than vague appeals to human sympathy or love. It calls for both understanding and moral clarity. We need a way of thinking about human movement that allows us to honor the best traditions of both the migrant and the host. And we need to see behind these accumulations of human wisdom the dignity of human beings as human beings. A deeper understanding of strangeness that understands migration and the reception of migrants as a vital—creative, life-giving, knowledge-producing—aspect of human existence will be required.

Alternative Narrative, Alternative Norms

For Christians, this understanding must come from our primary texts, the Bible and the creeds, and our primary practices, baptism and Eucharist. The church is the trustee of centuries of experience and thought across hundreds of cultures. Christian beliefs and practices contain within themselves resources for human flourishing. We need to exercise that trust with respect to issues of migration too.

These indispensable touchstones push the church away from a narrow construal of the issues, for at many points a Christian reflection on migration will overlap with a Jewish one since both nourish deep roots in the same texts and point to the same God. At a significant number of points, a Christian reflection will contact a Muslim one as well. So by no means do I use the word Christian in order to narrow the scope of this discussion to a small group or a hermetically sealed thought world.

The problem is that many Christians have lost track of the primal language of Scripture. Yes, we mount out-of-context Bible verses about God’s plans for us on gilt wall hangings and hold up John 3:16 signs at football games. But the shape and flow of the Bible, its core theological ideas, and the ways it witnesses to the story of God’s work in the world oft...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Shaun Casey
• Preface
• 1. The Reality of Migration
• 2. The Bible and the Migrant
• 3. Migration as Experience and Literary Theme
• 4. Exodus and Exile
• 5. Exodus, Exile, and Human Nature
• 6. The Law of the Stranger
• 7. The Voice of Prophecy
• 8. Israel as Migrant and Host of Migrants
• 9. New Testament Transformations
• 10. A Conclusion for Now
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index