Q. What do you think of this recent comment by Paula White (spiritual advisor to Donald Trump)? “Many people have taken biblical Scriptures out of context on this [issue of immigration] to say stuff like, ‘Well, Jesus was a refugee.’ Yes, He did live in Egypt for three and a half years. But it was not illegal. If He had broken the law then He would have been sinful and He would not have been our Messiah.”
The concept of legal vs. illegal immigration, when applied to the ancient world, is anachronistic and irrelevant. Ancient countries didn’t forbid foreigners to enter if they didn’t have certain permissions. (As one Christian leader has already observed in response to White’s comment, the concept “hardly applied during Jesus’ time, centuries before the existence of modern nation-states that issue passports and visas to regulate migration.”)
Rather, the issue was how the local population would treat foreigners who came to stay among them. And the biblical Scriptures are very clear about how God’s people should treat them. God told the Israelites, “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”
Jesus was a very particular kind of refugee: an asylum seeker. That is, he fled for safety to another country because he would have been killed if he had stayed in his own country. The fact that this “was not illegal” is the whole point. Trying to criminalize asylum seeking, whether in law, or through the way government policy is carried out, or in the popular imagination, is a departure from a time-honored international standard of justice and compassion.
If Jesus had been killed by Herod, he couldn’t have been our Savior, either.
