Following After Jesus

Following After Jesus—December 28, 2017

“Now after [the Magi] had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.’ Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by might, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son’.” [Matthew 2:13-15]

If we are going to be followers of Jesus, we will have to follow him wherever he goes, whether they are places that we would have chosen, or wished for, or liked… or not.

If we are going to call ourselves the people of God, it will mean we will have to learn to accept the labels that the living God chooses to wear, too.

That will mean that we followers of Jesus, we people of God, will have to get used to the idea of a God who is a refugee.  And it will mean confessing no other gods than the one who fled, in his infancy, his home country because his family was trying to give him a better chance of life away from the violence of their native government.  This, we should be clear, is one of the consequences of confessing “Jesus is Lord,” and of the precisely-worded, hard-fought theological debates in the life of the early church that led to official creeds like Nicea’s famous pronouncement, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God; begotten, not made; of one Being with the Father.”  To name Jesus as God (as Christians do) is to name God as a child refugee.

And that will forever change both how we see God, and how we see refugees.

And as Matthew describes the story we often call the Flight into Egypt, there is no other word for what the Son of God becomes.  He and his family are in hiding, hoping to escape what Matthew describes as a government-sponsored campaign to kill the children of Bethlehem, so afraid of usurpers is Herod.  Jesus, only into his toddlerhood at the oldest, is taken by Joseph along with his mother, fleeing their home country and hoping—because they have no credential other than hope—that they will be allowed to stay in Egypt until the threat has passed.  They have no legal right or status granting them permission to live in Egypt—only the necessity that they cannot stay back in Herod’s jurisdiction.  They have no guarantees that Egypt will take them in, much less allow them to stay, especially with no guesses as to how long they will be dependent upon the kindness of strangers in Egypt to take them in. (After all, what do you say to the customs agent about your intended length of stay?  “We’re visiting for as long as it takes a tyrant to die”?)  All they have is their need.

What is significant to me, reading this story some two thousand years after Matthew put it on paper for us, is that in Matthew’s mind, their sheer need is sufficient reason for their welcome into Egypt.  Matthew doesn’t invent some legal reason (a reminder to me that the gospel writers were not making up stories out of whole cloth, but were convinced that they were witnessing to the real presence of God within lived history) or some convenient detail for why Jesus had an ironclad right to seek residency in Egypt.  There is no whipping out of a long-lost Roman citizenship document, like Paul would use later in Acts to make an appeal to Caesar.  There are no visa papers for safe passage, like in the movie Casablanca, that would grant Jesus and his family a legal pretext for immigrating to Egypt.  Matthew only names their need: they had to flee, because the ruler of their land was hell-bent on wiping out whomever he saw as a threat.  And from Matthew’s perspective, the need is enough—he assumes that the sheer fact of their need for refuge was sufficient reason the Egyptians to take Jesus and his family in, and to stay there for however long it was until the dangerously unhinged ruler of their home country died, along with his vendettas against the baby boys of Bethlehem.

Now, as I say, a story like this cannot help but affect the way we view both refugees and the person of God alike.  We have a way, living in a land of unending McDonald’s restaurants and Wal-Marts, of forgetting that others’ lives are far harsher and far more threatened than our comfortable routines often are.  I was noticing just today with my son, as he washed his hands in a rest stop bathroom, how he stood with his hands under the soap dispenser, confused about why it wasn’t automatically squeezing out foam onto his six-year-old hands.  He looked at me, and he says, “It’s broken, Daddy!” And that was because he is used to an elementary school that has automatic faucets and soap dispensers in every bathroom.  It was a surprise to him that there were public places that didn’t have electronic sensors that turned on and off with a literal wave of his hands.  Now, there’s nothing wrong with a school that has such cool fixtures (it probably saves the school a fair amount of money in un-wasted water and prevents the spread of germs). But it was, for me, a poignant reminder of how many assumptions we make about the comforts and conveniences around us, and how we just figure everybody else in the world has them, too. 

We forget how many people do not merely live without automatic sensors on their school bathroom faucets, but have no running water in their schools, or no schools to attend. 

We forget, living in a society in which the stock markets close at bigger and bigger highs on a regular basis, how many people have no guarantees that there will be a place to buy food at all tomorrow, or next week. 

We forget, living day to day without having to cross through military checkpoints, how many people live in fear that soldiers may come in the night and round them up, or that rockets overhead may destroy the roof over their heads.

We forget what Matthew the gospel-writer took for granted: that the need is enough reason for granting refuge.  Matthew would remind us that at least we Christians can never hear a news story, a press conference, or a politician’s speech about “those refugees” without also seeing Jesus’ face among them.  Because he was one.

And conversely, we people of God cannot picture the heavenly throne room without seeing that the Ruler of the Universe and the Maker of all things wears the face of an asylum-seeker who sought refuge in a rich, stable neighboring country, despite the fact that his family didn’t speak the language or have job prospects when they came.  For whatever else that means, it says that God is not so protective of divine dignity or so insulated from human suffering as to avoid being labeled an asylum-seeker.  We may not be comfortable with it, but the Almighty One entered into the world in the life of a child whose only appeal to others was his need—not any leverage, or legal documentation, or livelihood he could provide for himself.  God’s entry into the world—and indeed the whole salvation of that world—depended on the welcome of the people in a new land, making a place for the child Jesus when all he brought to the table was desperation.  Kinda remakes our working definition of the word “God,” doesn’t it?

We sometimes think, deep down in ways that nobody wants to say out loud, that our lives are more important than the lives of “other people”—you know, people who are not “like us,” people who are from other places, people who didn’t have the sheer luck to be born in the places where we live.  We have a way of thinking it is perfectly normal to say, “It has to be Me and My Group First, because everyone’s supposed to look out for their own kind in this world.” We have a way of thinking it is fine to provide charity to people far away, as long as they stay far away and don’t bring their problems to our doors.  We tend to call this “just being reasonable.” 

But the son of Mary forces us to go on the record, if we are going to take such a position, and to declare that we think our lives (or rather, our comfort and complacency) are more important than God… because from the Flight to Egypt and now forever after, the living God chooses to wear the label “refugee.” 

About thirty-odd years after he himself had to seek refuge in a strange country because his parents chose to bring him to Egypt hoping to save his life, Jesus himself would famously say, “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.”  Sometimes we forget that he was not being figurative or melodramatic.  He was simply telling the truth. 

“I was a stranger, and you welcomed me,” says Jesus.  I guess the question to ask, if we can bear it, is this: Is he talking to us… or to someone else?

Lord Jesus, grant us the eyes to see you in all your humanity, down to the way you embraced need and depended on the welcome of others.  And grant us to see your presence, your reflected image, in the faces of those whose path cross with ours.