Jesus and the Refugee Crisis

“We should first help the Christian people before Islamic people.”

 Victor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary

Having grown up in an occupied country, Yusef and Mariam knew all too well the sight of foreign soldiers on the street. Though they had been poor and persecuted throughout their lives, their last few months in the Middle-East had been unbearable. When the local governor, a tyrant under the thumb of the occupying power, stepped up his paranoid suppression of political dissent, they feared for their lives. Like so many others, they fled their troubled lives in the Middle-East for the sanctuary of North Africa. They made their 300-mile journey just in time.  Days later, they heard rumours of a state-orchestrated massacre that had left hundreds of children dead.

While their story may seem tragically familiar, Yusef and Mariam were not part of the most recent refugee crisis. You’ll know them, of course, as Mary and Joseph. Their first Christmas, told in quaint carols, may seem hardly relevant to us today.  Yet this young family of refugees lived in a world not so different to ours. Demagogues like Donald Trump would do well to see a nativity play this Christmas.

Yes, the figure at the heart of Christianity would have been hated by the Daily Mail. To be a Christian is to believe that God became a poor and persecuted refugee in an occupied Middle-Eastern country. That’s not to say that he came to this world to fight a political cause. His crucifixion was not the climax of a failed political revolution, but the only act that could heal the broken relationship between man and God. Rather than marking his defeat at the hands of the Roman authorities, his death laid the foundations for the defeat of death itself. But faith in a man like this will inevitably transform your politics.

Sadly, some prominent champions of Christian heritage show no signs of this transformation. No doubt, some of them do hold sincere Christian beliefs. Others may call themselves “Christians” merely as a way of marginalising others.   But you cannot wrap your faith in a flag and call it “Christian Heritage”.

We cannot condemn the refugee while claiming to love Jesus. Every vitriolic headline of the Daily Mail, every malicious anti-refugee policy announced by Donald Trump and every country closing its borders in the name of Christian heritage may as well be attacking Jesus himself.  Would we leave Jesus to linger, alone and helpless, in the squalor of a makeshift camp in Calais? Would we check his teeth to ascertain his age at the border of Egypt? Would we denounce him as a threat to society while his body floated in the Mediterranean Sea?

In the Christian worldview, empathy is not the luxury of the bleeding-heart liberal.  An active empathy at the heart of Jesus’ teaching. You can see it in his command to love our neighbours and you can see it in his death in our place on the cross. He even says that the all the rules and regulations of the Old Testament can be summarised with just commandments: Love God with all your heart and love your neighbour as yourself.

Some try to limit that love towards our neighbours. They say that a country’s first duty is to protect its own citizens. They argue that charity begins at home. They even claim that these desperate refugees threaten the Christian heritage of our country. 

Similar things were said in Jesus’ day. On hearing the commandment to love your neighbour as yourself, one religious leader asked the obvious question: just who exactly is my neighbour?!

He replied with a story that will be familiar to many of us. While walking alone on the road out of Jerusalem, a Jewish man was attacked and left for dead. A Jewish priest saw him. He crossed to the other side of the road and carried on. Then another Jewish man saw him and did exactly the same. Then a Samaritan saw him. Instead of walking past, he stopped and bandaged his wounds. He took him to the nearest inn and paid for his care until he had recovered.

Who was the neighbour to the man on the road? The Samaritan, of course.

We must remember that the Samaritans were marginalised in Jewish society. In fact, most Jewish people would even avoid travelling through Samaria. They were ethnically and religiously different. Yet it was the Samaritan who was the true neighbour to the man in need. By asking “who is my neighbour?”, the religious leaders wanted to make Jesus’ commandments more manageable. Instead, Jesus responded by showing the impossibly high standards set by this radical commandment.

Jesus is clear: we must love our neighbour as ourselves, even if they are a different religion and ethnicity. This doesn’t mean accepting their beliefs. Jesus himself says that the Samaritan religion was not a way to God. It is clear, however, that this commandment is totally incompatible with the idea that we should only look after “our own”. When the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban refuses to help Muslim refugees, he is not defending “Christian Europe”.  He is breaking this commandment. He is hating the neighbour that we are commanded to love.

Of course, it’s not always simple to see how exactly loving our neighbour as ourselves. Jesus gives this commandment to us as individuals, rather than to any society or government. We can’t help all our neighbours across the world. Yet we do have power to help some. Like the Samaritan, we can use our money to help those in need. We should also remember that our political support for parties or individual politicians can help or hinder our love towards our neighbour.  This is, of course, something we all need to do more of. I know I do too little to help my neighbour and too much to help myself.

For individuals in government, it is clear that Christian heritage cannot be an excuse for standing by while others suffer. Jesus' teaching provides us with principles rather than policies. Loving your neighbour may not be simply letting in all immigrants. What seems loving in the short-term may be unsustainable and damaging in the long run. But loving your neighbour as yourself does mean treating unsuccessful asylum seekers as you would like to treated in the same circumstances. It means refusing to exploit anti-refugee sentiment to drum up political support. It means offering treating all with dignity, regardless of their religion.

All of us, right-wing demagogue or otherwise, should remember that Jesus was a refugee who commanded us to love God and love our neighbour as ourselves. If we use the Christian faith to marginalise refugees, we insult Jesus himself. 

“Remember that [God], who has united you together as human beings in the same flesh and blood, has bound you by the law of mutual love; that that mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian civilization; that it passes over the whole surface of the earth, and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its unmeasured scope.”

William Gladstone 

Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown and Human Nature

"My friend, I want to tell you and all your modern world a secret. You will not get to the good in people till you have been through the bad in them.” 

Father Brown, The Donnignton Affair

Since picking up The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in a discount bookshop in the halcyon days of my childhood, I have loved reading detective stories. Over a decade (and half a lifetime) later, while I am still a fan of Sherlock, there is another sleuth who just about beats him in the list of my favourite detectives.

While Sherlock Holmes solves a crime with cold, scientific deduction, G.K Chesterton’s Father Brown unmasks the criminal through philosophical insights, empathy and intuition. Not only do they employ different methods, they approach crime with contrasting worldviews.
Nine times out of ten, the murderers in Sherlock Holmes are “Villains”. Often, those Villains are professional criminals. Sometimes, those Villains will be disguised as “Good Men”. Alternatively, those who at first appear like Villains will turn out to be Good Men. There are exceptions, of course, but, more often than not in the world of 221b Baker Street, the criminals are Villains even before they commit the crime. The job of the detective is not only to solve the crime, it is to unmask the Villain who has been hiding as a Good Man. It seems, to me at least, to be a black and white world in which not only acts, but people, can be divided essentially into “Good” and “Bad”.

The cases of Father Brown are rather different. The murderers are not simply people who have hidden the fact that they are Villains. The apparent Villains aren’t revealed to be Good Men in disguise, but rather men, who, despite being thoroughly unpleasantly, are innocent of the crime in question. Sometimes the criminal’s lives have been marked by deception and criminality. But, more often than not, the culprits are normal people who have committed terrible crimes. In order to solve the crime, Father Brown thinks like the murderer. Rather than seeing the criminal as “the other”, he tries to understand their motive and their justification. He doesn’t just empathise with those who are guilty, he sympathises with them.

Contrary to what you might assume, Father Brown’s empathy with murderers is not based on the idea that humans are fundamentally good. Neither does it come from a belief in relative morality. In fact, as a conservative Catholic priest, he believes that all humans are equally corrupt. He believes in moral absolutes that humans are unable to abide by. As a result, he looks at murderers not with self-righteousness but with humility. He does not think that they are inhuman. In fact, he sees them as just as human as he is. They are equal to him. He looks at the guilty and thinks, as the saying goes, “there but for the grace of God.”

According to Father Brown’s Christian worldview, no-one is perfect. Is that a depressing world view? Not at all. In this worldview, no one has any grounds to be self-righteous. No one is a lost cause. It says something that, despite having been written long before the abolition of the death sentence, Father Brown never talks ominously about the gallows. There is always hope of redemption for those who have done terrible things. That’s not just the experience of one fictional Catholic Priest, it’s the experience of so many people throughout history.

“All men matter. You matter. I matter. It’s the hardest thing in theology to believe…We matter to God- God only knows why.”

Father Brown, A Quick One