A desert landscape, wilderness perils, and stories of exile and promise are more readily identified with the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, than the AZ/Mexico border. It is no accident the narrative of Israel’s refugee years resonates with the undocumented immigrant experience. For the sake of time, I will merely gloss over a few themes from the biblical narrative that are directly linked with the immigrant experience. Eve and Adam,Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Ruth, Naomi, Esther, David, Daniel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah are just a handful of characters who were immigrants to a new land. Abraham is praised for his willingness and faith to listen to a foreign God and travel to a foreign land. Ruth is honored as a Moabite to accompany her mother-in-law Naomi back to Cana’an and inherit both titles of stranger and widow, Jeremiah wept as he was carried away into exile and forced to leave all that was sacred and familiar to him.
It is no wonder, then, how foreignness became a theme applied to both the Hebrews and Yahweh in the Old Testament. Yahweh is the mysterious foreign god to those peoples the Hebrews encounter. The Hebrews are
the foreign invaders in Canaan, the foreign slaves in Egypt, and eventually the foreign exiles in Babylon.Consequently, it is not unusual legal texts and the narrative history includes the Hebrew words for ‘alien’ and ‘stranger’ more than 60 times. A good summation of these appearances is Leviticus 19.33-34. Aliens in the land are often paired with orphans and widows in Hebrew society. So, as a vulnerable group, Torah, or law, seeks to protect temporary and resident aliens through reminding Israel they once needed the same protection. The courtesy of protection extended to them should be extended to the stranger.
In the New Testament, Jesus embodies a model of hospitality through acceptance of individuals or groups outside the known acceptability for Jewish communities. Jesus reaffirms the laws protecting ‘alien’ and ‘stranger’ through his teaching to love God and neighbor. In apostolic epistles, 1 Peter, with some resonance in Pauline epistles, describes the Christian as the sojourner, or stranger, in all lands. As pilgrims of faith, hospitality toward other sojourners is necessary for the church’s survival. Lack of hospitality among Christians
is met with severe critique.
What I noticed in my time walking through the borderlands was how much the biblical narrative was meant for
a people who understand what it means to live as strangers in the land and model hospitality first extended from the hand of God.
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