In Christ There Is No Foreigner (Stand Against Xenophobia)
This courageous woman’s sign speaks for itself.
(Name and Image Credit Unknown. Shared via Facebook April 20th, 2015).
“In Christ’s family there can be no division into Jew and non-Jew, slave and free, male and female. Among us you are all equal. That is, we are all in a common relationship with Jesus Christ. Also, since you are Christ’s family, then you are Abraham’s famous ‘descendant,’ heirs according to the covenant promises.”
(Galatians 3:28-29, The Message)
The brutal death of Emmanuel Sithole (Warning: Graphic, violent, horrifying but necessary read). Flames of hate engulf Durban. A direct message on Twitter from a dear friend, married to a South African but from another country in Africa, sharing how shaken he is by the current xenophobic attacks in his region. When I asked him if his family was safe, his response was chilling: “My family is safe. I am trying to avoid crowded places where I am unknown.”
Another chilling video released by ISIS purportedly showing the execution of a group of captive Ethiopian Christians. The senseless murder of Walter Scott in South Carolina, following way too closely on the heels of a number of highly publicised incidents of police brutality against African Americans in the recent months.
Is it only me, or does it seem like my world is on fire right now, a chaotic mess of violence as we (literally) attack each other as human beings?
I rarely, if ever, find myself sounding this sort of alarm, which probably tells you more than you need to know about my family’s position of privilege, shelter, and safety from the reality that far too many fellow human beings in our world survive within each day. You could dismiss my voice as a feeble, futile attempt to wake up to a reality that my gender (male), skin colour (white), passport (American), or economic reality (even though we never think so, my family is overwhelmingly rich with resource) shelter my family from this chaos.
But I remember walking into an abandoned tire shop in the Pretoria CBD in August 2008 with my Canadian friend Jody, who was deeply burdened by the wave of xenophobic attacks against African nationals sweeping the city, joining him to visit hundreds of Zimbabwean immigrants literally hiding out from the violence, fearful for their lives. I met honest, hard-working, kind people. We kicked a soccer ball with their children, warmed ourselves against the cold winter air alongside fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, human beings exactly like you and me.
Human beings, exactly like you and me.
Stanley Hauerwas, a prominent New Testament theologian who often writes about the nature of humanity within the family of God, defines a human being in the following manner: “To be a human being is to first and foremost recognise that God became one of us in Jesus Christ. To be human means that we recognise that our lives are constituted first and foremost by God’s refusal to let us destroy ourselves. How we do that is through recognition of vulnerability.”
The New American Heritage Dictionary defines xenophobia with the following chilling words:
xenophobia |zɛnəˈfəʊbɪə| noun : intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries.
The Wikipedia entry for xenophobia unpacks this fear, describing it as “the unreasoned fear of that which is perceived to be foreign or strange. Xenophobia can manifest itself in many ways involving the relations and perceptions of an ingroup towards an outgroup, including a fear of losing identity, suspicion of its activities, aggression, and desire to eliminate its presence to secure a presumed purity.”
Xenophobia, like most human conflict, at its root level is founded upon fear and misperception, misunderstanding and ignorance of one’s neighbour. If I don’t know my neighbour, how can I love them? If I don’t understand my neighbour, how can I respond with compassion to their needs? A lack of knowledge and understanding precede fear and violence, but not by too thick a margin.
So how does Christ address the foreigner among us? With trademark conviction, Jesus cuts to the heart of the matter in Luke 10, bypassing the religious scholar’s technical parsing of Old Testament regulation as to who constitutes my neighbour by telling a story so convicting that the scholar had to conclude that ‘The one who had mercy on him” (Luke 10:37, NIV) was the most neighbourly of all, even as a hated Samaritan! Across the Scriptures Old and New, God’s voice thunders with a clarity that underscores just how critical this issue is to His heart: All of us were outsiders – aliens, foreigners, enemies. All of have been accepted into the family of God – brothers and sisters, adopted and valued as one, friends to all.
To love one’s neighbour – regardless of color, proximity, or convenience – is to bear witness to the welcome you have received by God Himself, a Father who scans the horizon for all His children that have lost their way. As the well-known parable says, when the lost son was still a long way off, “his father saw him. His heart pounding, he ran out, embraced him, and kissed him” (Luke 15:20, The Message).
Who is my neighbour is a futile exercise in conveniently missing the point entirely. How I treat my neighbour – with endless mercy and kindness, grace upon grace – whether my spouse, family member, work colleague, physical neighbour, or scary stranger that couldn’t be more different from me – is the whole point.
So much so that Jesus concludes that the entire Law and Prophets – the entire Jewish canon, in other words – “hang on these commandments” (Matthew 22:40, NIV).
We are all human beings, vulnerable in our fragility. Let us embrace Hauerwas’ provocative assertion that being human involves the recognition that our lives are profound testimonies to the grace-filled refusal of God to let us destroy ourselves. And as we embrace this grace, may we extend it towards “the other,” for the other is a priceless human being exactly like you and me.
“When a foreigner lives with you in your land, don’t take advantage of him. Treat the foreigner the same as a native. Love him like one of your own. Remember that you were once foreigners in Egypt. I am God, your God.”
(Leviticus 19:33-34, The Message)