By Bill Leonard
As Advent turns to Christmas and the reality of a New Year looms, we revisit that often overlooked post-nativity saga portrayed by innumerable artists as “the flight to Egypt.” Matthew 2:12-14 says that after the Magi left town, Joseph dreamed of an angel who tells him: “‘Get up, take the child and his mother and escape with them to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you; for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.’ So Joseph got up, took mother and child by night, and sought refuge with them in Egypt.”
As the Holy Family crossed the border into Egypt, “by night,” did they become first century undocumented immigrants? Illegal aliens? Political refugees? Asylum seekers?
Whatever else, Joseph, Mary and the babe were clearly “strangers in the land,” an ancient designation that elicited multiple responses from the people of the Bible.
In biblical text and culture the stranger is: 1) An outsider, not of the tribe; 2) An other, not like “us”; 3) A sojourner, merely passing through; 4) An alien, from some other place; 5) An enemy, who threatens culture, religion, and security; 6) An unexpected presence, sometimes divine, sometimes demonic; 7) A “sign of the Kingdom,” revealing God’s activity with the people on the margins.
The Bible offers various, sometimes contradictory, ways for dealing with the stranger that include exclusion, fear, hospitality, rejection and genocide, as well as rules for engagement, negotiation of boundaries, evolving relationships and continuing debate.
Regulations for responding to strangers appear quickly in the biblical text: “This is the stature for the Passover: No foreigner may partake of it.” (Exodus 12:43) “And you must not procure any such [sacrificial] creature from a foreigner and present it as food for your God. Their deformity is inherent in them, a permanent defect…” (Leviticus 22:25).
The category of “resident alien” describes a non-citizen who lingers in the land and is not simply passing through. In the Hebrew bible such persons often receive a special response from the “reputable” community in such rules as: “do not oppress the alien, for you know how it feels to be an alien; you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.” (Exodus 23:9) “These are the words of the Lord, deal justly and fairly, rescue the victim from his oppressor, do not ill-treat or use violence towards the alien, the fatherless and the widow” (Jeremiah 22:3).
At other times the stranger/other is an enemy to be confronted: “Thus Joshua took the whole land, the hill-country, all the Negeb, and the land of Goshen…. It was the Lord’s purpose that they should offer stubborn resistance to the Israelites, and thus be annihilated and utterly destroyed” (Joshua 11: 16, 20).
Sometimes the stranger is a messenger of the divine, as in Genesis 18 when “three strangers” show up at Abraham’s camp and one of them predicts that Sarah, his spouse, will have a child within the next year. Sarah laughs in his face, realistically, “because I am out of my time and my husband is old.” Turns out that the stranger is actually “the Lord” who asserts that a pregnancy will indeed occur. Sarah gets serious and denies laughing, but the stranger/Lord insists, “O yes, you did.” Sure enough, a child is born and they name him, what else, Isaac (Laughter), and Sarah says: “Everyone who hears this story will laugh with me.”
Strangers can be prophetic and ironic all at once. In fact, Hebrews 13:2 advises: “Do not neglect to show hospitality, by doing this some have entertained angels unawares.”
Jesus confronts the problem of the stranger in his famous sermon in the Nazareth synagogue: “In Elisha’s time,” he says, “there were many lepers in Israel, and not one of them was healed, but only Naaman, the Syrian. “These words roused the whole congregation to fury” (Luke 4:27-28).
Yet on another occasion, he rebukes the Gentile woman, “a Phoenician of Syria by nationality,” who asks him to heal her daughter. “It is not good to give the children’s bread and give it to dogs,” he declares, but she answers back: “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps.” Jesus melts under the stranger’s stubborn faith and the child is healed (Mark 7:26-27).
Might these biblical clues inform contemporary dilemmas caused by the strangers in our midst? All societies have “resident aliens” and “others” whose presence raise questions about culture, tribe, identity and security. For members of the Body of Christ, radical love demands radical response, evident in Jesus’ profound one-liner? “I was a stranger, and you took me in” (Matthew 25:35).
On the eve of a New Year, could any of these “hard sayings” inform our own struggles with the stranger in our midst? Who knows? Surely they are worth considering on the “flight to Egypt” with Jesus, then and now.