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