By Johnny Zokovitch
The utter incompatibility between the Trump administration’s immigration policies and enforcement and the biblical demand that Christians (and Jews) welcome the stranger could not be more pronounced than in the readings we revisit every Advent and Christmas. From Matthew’s portrayal of the Holy Family as refugees fleeing Herod’s violence to Luke’s account of their government-forced displacement from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the commonalities with the people being rounded up, detained and deported in the US today could not be more evident.
Some Christians (most famously, Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general, back in 2018) cite a particular biblical passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans to defend their approach to immigration, implying in the process that God supports such efforts.
“Let every person be subordinate to the higher authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been established by God,” Paul wrote. “Therefore, whoever resists authority opposes what God has appointed, and those who oppose it will bring judgment upon themselves.”
Such authorities on Scripture would do well to keep on reading that letter, because just a few verses later, Paul writes:
“The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; you shall not kill; you shall not steal; you shall not covet,’ and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this saying, [namely] ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no evil to the neighbor; hence, love is the fulfillment of the law.”
It’s hard to jibe what is being done to immigrants all across this country with Paul’s assertion that “love does no evil to the neighbor.” But if Christians who support Trump’s war on our immigrant neighbors want to get biblical, then let’s get biblical.
Besides the status of the Holy Family in our Advent and Christmas readings, our Scriptures are pretty consistent in instructing us about how we’re to treat “the strangers (alternately the alien, the foreigner, the sojourner, the immigrant, the refugee) among us…”
- Exodus 22:20, “You shall not oppress or afflict a resident alien, for you were once aliens residing in the land of Egypt,” and 23:9, “You shall not oppress a resident alien; you well know how it feels to be an alien, since you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.”
- Leviticus 19:33-34, “When an alien resides with you in your land, do not mistreat such a one. You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself…”
- Deuteronomy 10:17-19, “For the LORD, your God, is the God of gods, the Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who has no favorites, accepts no bribes, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and loves the resident alien, giving them food and clothing. So you too should love the resident alien, for that is what you were in the land of Egypt.”
- Matthew 25:35, “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me…”
- Hebrews 13:1-2, “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect hospitality, for through it some have unknowingly entertained angels.”
In the passages from the Hebrew Bible, there is an emphasis that treatment of immigrants, foreigners in the land, is based on “memory,” i.e. “Remember you were once strangers too…”
During this season when we place under our trees and on our front lawns and in our churches replicas of a Holy Family who experienced first-hand what it means to be strangers in a land not their own, Christians would do well to remember our Scriptures.
From Exodus throughout recent history, the people of God have been made up of wanderers, sojourners, refugees, and immigrants. The people being arrested, imprisoned and deported today are the people of God throughout history, a people for whom God intervenes over and over and over again. Their story has been ours all along.
God’s requirement of the new community of slaves that he had freed from Egypt is that they “remember.” God directs them to remember their own former state as foreigners, aliens, immigrants and strangers and to remember how it is that God chose them and treated them. And that they are called to do likewise.
Whether our story is the biblical story or the story of immigrants past who came to this country fleeing poverty, violence, and persecution, how do so many of us not remember? Especially at Christmas?
Johnny Zokovitch is the former executive director of Pax Christi USA. He currently serves on the board of the Pax Christi International Fund for Peace and is in pastoral leadership at St. Cronan Catholic Church in St. Louis.