You may have heard me say it many times over the last few years: Jesus was a refugee. An angel told Jesus’ family to flee to Egypt by night because King Herod was seeking to find him and kill him. His family remained in Egypt until Herod died, and then began making their way back home. However, when they heard that Herod’s son was now reigning, Joseph became afraid, and an angel warned him to flee to the district of Galilee rather than return home.
My friends… this is a perfect image of a political refugee. A person’s life is in danger because of a politician. That person has to run away to a land that is not their own, outside of the jurisdiction of that specific politician, in order to not be murdered. They fled in the night. They were worried about returning home. When they tried to return home, the fear was so strong that they couldn’t make it all the way.
I have been preaching Jesus as a refugee for years, and every time I do, someone rises up with fervor to explain the socio-political world of Israel and Egypt, and how Jesus was not a refugee because he didn’t break any laws.
But such a statement is missing the forest for the trees. If I have to flee from Michigan to take refuge in Kentucky because the governor of Michigan has threatened to murder me, and I live in constant fear of returning home even after the governor has died, then I am a political refugee. There is no need to get into the minutia to try to define me as something else. Doing so ignores the blatantly obvious picture hanging on the wall in front of us.
Making Jesus a refugee was intentional on God’s part, as it fulfilled at least two prophecies, according to Matthew’s account. But I believe it was intentional beyond that. God had spoken many times in the Old Testament about foreigners, and now he wanted to say it loud and clear by putting on the skin of a refugee and living out that life. How you treat foreigners, sojourners, immigrants, and refugees is how you treat Jesus, for he was one himself.
“But Jesus would never sin,” some might reply. “We have laws in America about who can be here, and Jesus would never break our laws.”
First off, who said being undocumented is always a sin in God’s eyes? In Les Misérables, is Jean Valjean truly a sinner for stealing a single loaf of bread to feed his starving family? Did he deserve the initial 5 years of imprisonment and hard labor for his tiny violation of the law? Did God think that was fair, just, and right? Was God more concerned with Valjean stealing something that cost a few bucks, or more concerned with a society that had put a man in a situation to steal a loaf of bread? Is Valjean the sinner, or are we?
Is God more concerned about a political refugee following the laws of America, or more concerned with a society that has no concern for political refugees? Is God up in Heaven documenting the undocumented, to hold it against them? Will he look to the refugee on the day of judgment and say, “I know you were going to die if you stayed where you were, but you know the laws of America. You should have died horribly so I could let you into Heaven. I know, my son had to hide too, but he did it legally.”
Does that sound like the God that was shown to us through Jesus? Does that sound like a just judge? Is God black-and-white on the law? Are human laws the same thing as God’s laws? Are human judgments the same as God’s judgments?
No. Of course not. A perfect omniscient judge like God knows how to judge with all the facts and is not hard of heart toward those who are suffering in this world. It’s his land anyway—we’re just the landlords.
For the black-and-white judgers of Jesus’ time, Jesus seemed to be breaking religious laws left and right. Indeed, many struggle to understand Jesus’ reasoning as to how he wasn’t breaking religious laws whenever he was accused of doing so. Had we seen it then, we would have probably agreed with the religious leaders that Jesus was playing fast and loose with the rules.
But that’s just the thing—Jesus can’t break the law, because he is the fulfillment of the law. Whatever true law is, it is Jesus. And when you live by him as the law, you disrupt the society around you. And when you disrupt society around you, the lawmakers of this world might persecute or kill you. Jesus demonstrated that himself by being threatened with death by politicians as a child and put to death by politicians as an adult. He goes out as an innocent man, sitting in the electric chair of his time, reminding us of the injustice always around us.
Martin Luther King Jr. reminds us that when we find unjust laws in our society, we must become “maladjusted” to them. Indeed, as history has proven time and again, sometimes it is a sin to fall in line with the law. Sometimes the most righteous thing you can do is to break the law, like those who ran the Underground Railroad and those who hid Jews from the Nazis.
We have no need to wrestle with the idea that Jesus was a refugee. The story stares us directly in the face and beckons us to acknowledge it. Let us humble ourselves and admit the truth: we don’t want Jesus to be a refugee because that means something today that we don’t want to admit. Once we’ve done that, let’s repent and get back to loving our neighbors—the ones we have, not the ones we choose. Documented or not.
This is the Christ we were given, not the Christ we chose. Let us choose Christ as he was and is and is to come, and not crucify him back into our own shapes.
Jamin Bradley 
Leave a comment