the time to understand. The rhetoric is one of fear and hate.
Unfortunately, for much of American history, significant parts of the church have been at the forefront of such rhetoric, often quoting parts of the Old Testament about keeping separate from others or the threats of intermarriage as justification for why we should keep America as a Christian (which is really code for white, evangelical, and Protestant) nation. That has begun to shift in recent years, as more and more churches become involved in refugee resettlement, but the years of accretion have laid a foundation of distrust and fear and hate, which churches must intentionally combat, as the church has been responsible for its creation.
This story about Jesus, then, comes at the right time, as Jesus fits so many of these categories. Jesus fits the definition of a migrant, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: “A person who moves temporarily or seasonally from place to place.” Jesus also fits the definition of a refugee: “A person who has been forced to leave his or her home and seek refuge elsewhere, esp. in a foreign country, from war, religious persecution, political troubles, the effects of a natural disaster, etc.; a displaced person.” In fact, if we focus on the part of the definition that centers around religious persecution and/or political troubles, Jesus seems the quintessential refugee.
Jesus is fleeing genocide, caused by his appearance (and the belief that he is the long-expected Messiah, leading to the religious persecution), the slaughter of the innocents, as many people often refer to this passage. Joseph has to take his family to Egypt to keep them alive, then he has to go to Nazareth rather than Bethlehem, as Joseph is afraid to return his family to where they have been living for at least two years (based on the age of the children Herod kills) and possibly longer. In the gospel of Matthew’s account, Joseph and Mary didn’t come from Nazareth down to Bethlehem for the census; that only shows up in the gospel of Luke. Instead, it sounds as if Joseph and Mary have always been living in Bethlehem. Thus, Nazareth becomes the place that takes in the refugee family, as they have had to resettle there. Jesus, then, spends the first three or so years of his life being forcibly relocated from Bethlehem to Egypt, then to Nazareth where the family has to begin all over again, as refugees today do. Joseph and Mary, though, are at least able to resettle in a place where they know the language, religion, and culture, unlike so many refugees today.
There is never any evidence that they struggle from this resettlement, but we also don’t have any information about the next ten or so years of Jesus’s life in any of the gospels. We do know that Joseph disappears, which would have made their life more difficult if he died or for some other reason was taken away from the family.
The passage from Isaiah draws on God’s salvation for the people of Israel when they were refugees, when they were fleeing Egypt, as well, and moving to what would become Israel. What is interesting to note, though, is what happens after they arrive. The first half of this passage talks about all that God has done for the Israelites, commenting, “Surely they are my people, children who will not deal falsely.” The author of Isaiah clearly lays out the idea that people who have received such grace and salvation will never cease to appreciate such goodness in their life. The second half of the passage makes it clear that they have stopped remembering what God has done, though it ends with hope that such a view of the world will change.
The same pattern is true when we talk about how Americans have treated those who have come after us. All of us (save for those American Indians among us) came from immigrants, many as migrants and refugees, fleeing persecution. Our ancestors came here and set themselves up in new lives, working to provide for their children and grandchildren. Now that we are established, though, we turn against those who might come after us, treating them as the Other, even as our ancestors were so treated. The only hope we have is to see them all as Jesus, as ourselves, and to love them accordingly. Only then will we be able to say, as the end of the passage from Isaiah does, “Thus you led your people, to make for yourself a glorious name.”
Questions for Reflection or Discussion:
How should we as churches and as Christians help with the refugee crisis?
What can the church do to shift the immigration debate towards one of love?
Tipping Points
The Feast of the Epiphany
Matthew 2:1–12
Ephesians 3:1–12
The lectionary selections are clearly trying to guide an interpretation of the passage from the gospel of Matthew for Epiphany. With the inclusion of Galatians talking about the Gentiles, the predominant way of reading the arrival of the Magi is to talk about how Jesus’s coming broadens God’s message out from the Jews to the inclusion of the Gentiles. From there, it makes sense to talk about how Jesus’s arrival and ministry is one that centers around crossing boundaries or barriers. Now that God’s love is clearly available to all (there are Old Testament passages that also state that it is, but we tend to ignore those to make a clear divide between Old Testament exclusion and Jesus’s New Testament inclusion), Jesus serves as a representative of that widening.
I don’t want to diminish such a reading, as Jesus’s life and ministry clearly reflect this idea. Whether it was women or tax collectors or Samaritans or Pharisees or Romans or prostitutes, Jesus reached out to everyone he encountered, no matter their ethnicity or religious beliefs or gender or status in society. Jesus’s life exemplifies how we, too, should not let barriers keep us from truly loving our neighbors, no matter who they and we are. There are plenty of passages that illustrate that idea.
What the story of the arrival of the Magi should also illustrate is the power that dominates our world, but also how that power is much more fragile than we imagine. When the wise men from the East arrive and stop to ask King Herod where the child who “has been born King of the Jews” is, the text reads, “When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him . . . ” Here is one of the most powerful people in the area, still under the dominion of Rome, certainly, but with almost unchecked power, and he is frightened by these wise men who have come into his country looking for a child, whom they say will be the King of the Jews.
That fear will ultimately lead Herod to kill all of the children he believes could possibly be the one the wise men tell him about, and it leads him to mislead the wise men here. He is so unsure of his power that he becomes so shaken by the simple arrival of a child that he is willing to slaughter countless children. We typically don’t think of power in this way. Instead, we think of those who are so secure in their positions that they have no worries, that their lives are ones of ease and comfort.
However, what those in power know (and what those of us not in those positions often forget) is how precarious that power actually is. They have seen people who have tried, as they did, to move up those levels only to be denied, whether through demotions, exile, or even death. These successful people were often the ones doing the demoting, exiling, or killing, in fact. Given that they know how easily they could dispose of other people, they also know how tenuous their hold on their position is. If they could do these horrific actions to someone else, then someone could just as easily remove them in one of these ways.
Rather than provide us with discouragement about the evils of humanity (though we should certainly remember that truth), we should draw hope from this story, as there are other ways of removing people of power, even by those of us who seemingly have little in our society. The Herods of this world must not only worry about those whom they have wronged on their way up or the ones who will come after them, trying to supplant them. They must also worry about the people they supposedly have power over, as people will only remain in those positions for a certain amount of time. If history teaches us anything, it shows us that people—when gathered together for a common cause against oppression—can overthrow those in power.
The problem the powerless have is that the powerful seem invulnerable, but they only seem that way until they no longer do. For those who grew up during the Cold War, the Berlin Wall seemed impregnable until it was torn down. For those who suffered through years of oppression via Jim Crow laws, those rules seemed immovable until they weren’t. For those in wheelchairs or blind, the obstacles that prevented them from entering buildings and jobs seemed insurmountable until