By Fr Ron Rolheiser, OMI
On borders everywhere in the world today we find refugees, millions of them. They’re easily demonized, seen as a nuisance, a threat, as invaders, as criminals fleeing justice in their homelands. But mostly they are decent, honest people fleeing poverty, hunger, victimization, and violence. And these reasons for fleeing their homelands strongly suggest that most of them are not criminals.
Irrespective of the fact that most of them are good people, they are still seen most everywhere as a problem. We need to keep them out! They are a threat! Indeed, politicians frequently use the verb invasion to describe their presence on our borders.
What’s to be said about this? Do we just let everyone in? Do we select judiciously among them, letting some in and keeping others out? Do we put up walls and barbed wire to block their entry? What’s to be our response?
These questions need to be examined from two perspectives: pragmatically and biblically.
Pragmatically this is a huge issue. We cannot simply open all borders and let millions of people flood into our countries. That’s unrealistic. On the other hand, we may not justify our reluctance to let refugees into our countries by appealing to the bible, or to Jesus, or to the naïve rationalization that “our” countries are ours and we have a right to be here while others don’t unless we grant them entrance. Why not?
For Christians, there are a number of non-negotiable biblical principles at play here.
First, God made the world for everybody. We are stewards of a property not our own. We don’t own anything, God does, and God made the world for everybody. That’s a principle we too easily ignore when we speak of barring others from entering “our” country. We happen to be stewards here, in a country that belongs to the whole world.
Second, the Bible everywhere, in both testaments of scripture, is clear (and strong) in challenging us to welcome the stranger and the immigrant. This is everywhere present in the Jewish scriptures and is a strong motif at the very heart of Jesus’ message. Indeed, Jesus begins his ministry by telling us that he has come to bring good news to the poor. Hence, any teaching, preaching, pastoral practice, political policy, or action that is not good news for the poor is not the gospel of Jesus Christ, whatever its political or ecclesial expediency. And, if it is not good news for the poor, it may not cloak itself with the Gospel or with Jesus. Hence, any decisions we make vis-à-vis refugees and immigrants should not be antithetical to the fact that the Gospels are about bringing good news to the poor.
Moreover, Jesus makes this even clearer when he identifies the poor with his own person (Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, you do to me) and tells us that at the end of the day we will be judged by how we treat the immigrants and refugees (Depart from me because I was a stranger and you didn’t welcome me). There are few texts in scripture as raw and challenging as this one (Matthew 25, 35-40)
Finally, we also find this challenge in scripture: God challenges us to welcome foreigners (immigrants) and share our love, food, and clothing with them because we ourselves were once immigrants (Deuteronomy 10, 18-19). And this isn’t just some abstract biblical axiom, especially for us who live in North America. Except for the Indigenous nations (whom we forcefully displaced) we are all immigrants here and are challenged by our faith never to forget this, not least when dealing with hungry people on our borders. Of course, those of us who have been here for a number of generations can make the moral case that we have been here a long time and are no longer immigrants. But perhaps a more compelling moral case can be made suggesting it can be rather self-serving to close the borders after we ourselves are in.
These are biblical challenges. However, after they are affirmed, we are still left with the practical question; what realistically do we (and many countries around the world) do with the millions and millions of men, women, and children arriving at our border? How do we honor the fact that the land we live in belongs to everyone? How do we honor that fact that, as Christians, we have to think first about the poor? How will we face Jesus in judgment when he asks us why we didn’t welcome him when he was in the guise of a refugee? And how do we honor the fact that almost every one of us is an immigrant, living in a country we forcibly took from someone else?
There are no easy answers to those questions, even while at the end of the day we still need to make some practical political decisions. However, in our pragmatism, in sorting this out, we should never be confused about which side Jesus and the Bible are on.
Used with permission of the author, Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser. Currently, Father Rolheiser is currently serving as President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio Texas. He can be contacted through his website, www.ronrolheiser.com. Follow on Facebook www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser.
