The Stranger at the Border

There is a word that shows up in the Bible more often than most Sunday school teachers ever mention. In Hebrew it is ger. In most English Bibles it gets translated as stranger, sojourner, alien, or foreigner. It means a person who has left the place they were born and is now living in a land that is not theirs, under the protection of people who did not have to take them in.

You can count how often the word appears. Depending on which scholar is doing the counting, the command to love, protect, feed, house, or refuse to oppress the ger shows up somewhere between thirty-six and ninety-two times in the Hebrew Bible alone. Even the low number is higher than the number of times the Bible mentions almost anything else people argue about on television.

I am not a Hebrew scholar. I am the onlooker. I am the person who opened the book, read the word, saw how often it appears, and then looked up and saw a movement that calls itself biblical spending a great deal of energy doing the exact opposite of what the word demands.

That gap is what this chapter is about.

What the Book Actually Says

Start in Exodus, because Exodus is where the movement likes to start when it wants to talk about God rescuing His people. The book is barely underway when God gives a reason for the command He is about to hand down.

You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Exodus 22:21)

Notice the logic. God does not say, do not oppress the stranger because it is nice. He says, do not oppress the stranger because you remember what it felt like to be one. The command is rooted in memory. If you forget that you were once the foreigner, you will become the thing that once crushed you.

A few chapters later, He says it again.

You shall not oppress a stranger, since you yourselves know the feelings of a stranger, for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Exodus 23:9)

Then Leviticus, which is the book most modern Christians only quote when they are trying to condemn something.

When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34)

Read that slowly. The command is not tolerate. The command is not process. The command is love him as yourself. The same phrase Jesus later called the second greatest commandment gets applied here, in the Torah, to the foreigner living inside your borders. And the reason given is the same reason again. You were once him.

Deuteronomy makes the economics of it plain.

When you reap your harvest in your field and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow, in order that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. (Deuteronomy 24:19)

The stranger is not an intruder in the economy. The stranger has a place in it. The law tells the landowner to leave part of the harvest behind on purpose so that the person who owns no land can eat. That is not charity handed down from a stage. That is a legal claim written into how food gets produced.

Then the prophets.

Thus has the Lord of hosts said, "Dispense true justice and practice kindness and compassion each to his brother; and do not oppress the widow or the orphan, the stranger or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another." (Zechariah 7:9-10)

So I will come near to you for judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers and against the adulterers and against those who swear falsely, and against those who oppress the wage earner in his wages, the widow and the orphan, and those who turn aside the alien and do not fear Me. (Malachi 3:5)

Malachi is worth pausing on. The prophet stacks up a list of things that will make God show up as a witness against a people. Sorcery. Adultery. Perjury. Wage theft. Neglect of widows and orphans. And right there in the list, treated as the same kind of sin, is turning aside the alien. The person who pushes the immigrant away is placed in the same paragraph as the person who cheats the worker and the person who swears falsely in court.

Then the New Testament, because the movement likes to say the Old Testament does not apply to them.

Matthew 25 is the passage where Jesus describes the final judgment. Not a parable about seeds. Not a metaphor about lamps. A courtroom scene where the King separates people based on how they treated the least of these. Read what He lists.

For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in. (Matthew 25:35)

There is that word again. Stranger. The foreigner. The one who did not belong. Jesus places Himself inside that person. He says, when you welcomed the stranger, you welcomed Me. When you refused, you refused Me. And in the same passage He tells the ones who refused that they are going away into eternal punishment.

I am not adding heat to the text. That is what the text says. The consequence for turning the stranger away, in the words of the person the movement claims to follow, is not embarrassment. It is not political defeat. It is judgment.

Hebrews puts it more gently and just as firmly.

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it. (Hebrews 13:2)

The writer is telling a young church that the person knocking at the door might be more than they appear. Treat every stranger as if heaven itself might be standing there. That is the posture the early church was taught to hold.

Put all of it together. The Torah tells the landowner to leave food for the foreigner. The prophets place the mistreatment of the foreigner alongside adultery and perjury on the list of things that call down judgment. Jesus makes welcome of the foreigner a criterion of salvation. The apostles tell the church to treat every stranger as if an angel could be under the coat.

That is not a footnote in the book. That is a spine running through the whole thing.

What the Onlooker Sees

Now I set the book down and I look up.

I watch a movement that puts a Bible on a flag and a flag on a pulpit. I watch it cheer when a wall goes up. I watch it cheer when children are separated from their parents at a border. I watch it cheer when families that have lived in the same neighborhoods for decades are taken away in vans in the early morning. I watch pastors who quote Leviticus about who someone should be allowed to marry go completely silent about Leviticus when it says the stranger shall be to you as the native among you.

I hear the language change. The word is not ger anymore. The words are illegal, invader, animal, infestation, poisoning the blood. I have read the Bible cover to cover and I cannot find a single verse where God uses that vocabulary for a human being. I can find prophets using that kind of vocabulary. They use it for empires that crush the poor. They never use it for the poor arriving at the gate.

I watch a preacher stand up on a Sunday and say the country is a Christian nation. Then I watch him stand up on a Monday and defend a policy that would have sent the Holy Family back across the border into the hands of the king who wanted their child dead. Because that is what Matthew 2 says. Joseph took the child and the mother and fled to Egypt in the night. The Holy Family were refugees. They crossed a border without papers to save a child's life. Egypt let them stay. If Egypt had done what a large part of the American church now cheers for, the story of Christianity would have ended in Bethlehem with a small grave.

I watch this and I cannot make the math work. The book that the movement waves and the behavior the movement celebrates are not describing the same religion.

The Reasons Given

I have listened carefully to the reasons the movement gives when it is pressed on this. There are usually three, and they all fall apart on contact with the text.

The first reason is the law. We are told that Romans 13 requires Christians to obey the government, and that people who cross a border without papers are breaking the law, and that therefore removing them is a Christian duty. That reading only works if you have not read Romans 13 in context and if you have not read the rest of the New Testament at all. The same apostle who wrote Romans 13 also went to prison for breaking the law of the empire. Peter told the authorities in Acts 5 that he had to obey God rather than men. Daniel broke the law of Babylon in order to keep praying. The Hebrew midwives in Exodus 1 broke the law of Pharaoh in order to keep babies alive, and the text says God was good to them for it. The Bible does not treat the law of the land as the final word. The Bible treats the law of God as the final word, and the law of God on the stranger is not ambiguous.

The second reason is scarcity. We are told there is not enough. Not enough jobs. Not enough housing. Not enough room. Jesus fed five thousand people with five loaves and two fish and there were twelve baskets left over. The whole point of the miracle is that the disciples looked at the crowd and said, send them away, and Jesus said, you give them something to eat. The movement has taken the disciples' line and turned it into policy. Send them away. It has forgotten which character in the story is supposed to be imitated.

The third reason is safety. We are told that the stranger is dangerous, that the border is a threat, that the country must be protected. Read the book. The people God calls dangerous in Scripture are almost never the poor arriving with nothing. They are the powerful sitting on gold. Isaiah calls out the rulers who grind the face of the poor. Amos calls out the merchants who tilt the scales. Jesus calls out the religious leaders who devour widows' houses. The prophet's finger is almost always pointed at the top of the pile, not at the bottom. The movement has learned to point it at the bottom.

None of the three reasons survives a careful reading. But careful reading is not what the movement is doing. The movement is doing selection. It picks the verses that comfort and skips the verses that disturb.

The Word That Does Not Appear

Here is something I noticed after reading through the whole Bible looking for how it treats foreigners.

I could not find a passage that tells the people of God to build a wall to keep the poor out.

I could find a wall in Nehemiah, but it was to protect a city that had already been destroyed once and to give the returning refugees a chance to rebuild. I could find a wall in Revelation, but the gates of that wall never close and the nations bring their glory through them. I could find no passage anywhere that treats the arrival of a hungry family at the border as a threat to be repelled by force.

There is a wall in the Gospels, but it is the one Jesus tears down. Ephesians 2 describes His work as breaking down the dividing wall of hostility between people. The movement that carries His name has spent the last decade putting the wall back up brick by brick and calling that Christian.

The Family the Book Never Names

I want to sit for a moment with the family in Matthew 2.

A political leader hears a rumor that a child has been born who will rival his power. He is terrified. Fear moves him to give an order that soldiers will remember for the rest of their lives. He tells them to kill every boy under two in a small town. The order goes out. The soldiers ride.

An angel warns the father in a dream. The family gets up in the middle of the night. They pack what they can carry. They do not have documents. They do not have permission. They do not have a plan for how they will be received when they arrive. They cross the border into Egypt because if they stay, the child dies.

Egypt takes them in. The text says nothing about a wall. The text says nothing about a policy of deterrence. The text says they lived there until it was safe to return.

Read that story and then read the modern policy and then read the sermons that defend the modern policy. Try to hold all three in your head at once. That is the exercise. That is the whole exercise this book is asking you to do.

If the Holy Family arrived at the border today, in the country that calls itself Christian, the movement would be lining up to send them back.

I am not exaggerating for effect. I am describing what I have watched.

What the Early Church Did

The book does not just tell us what to think about the stranger. It tells us what the first Christians did with the teaching. That is worth looking at, because the movement today claims to be recovering the early church.

In Acts 6 the church has a fight. There are widows in the community who are being neglected in the daily distribution of food. The neglected widows are Hellenists, which means they were from a foreign culture, spoke a different first language, and were treated as outsiders even inside the church. The apostles do not tell those widows to go back where they came from. The apostles create an office. They ordain deacons whose whole job is to make sure the outsider widow gets fed. The first administrative act of the first church was to protect the foreigner inside the community.

In the second century, when plague swept through the cities of the empire, one of the reasons Christianity grew was that Christians stayed and nursed the sick. They did not just nurse their own. They nursed everyone. They took in the abandoned babies the empire left on the trash heap. Roman writers hostile to the faith commented on it, sometimes with disgust, sometimes with grudging admiration. The church expanded because it welcomed the people no one else wanted.

That is what the movement claims to be recovering. That is not what I watch it doing.

The Passage Almost Never Preached

There is a story in Luke 10 that most people know as the Good Samaritan. It is one of the most familiar parables in the Bible. And it is almost never preached on the point Jesus was actually making.

A lawyer asks Jesus who his neighbor is. He is asking because he wants to draw a small circle. He wants a definition tight enough that he can love his neighbor without having to love very many people. Jesus does not give him a definition. Jesus tells him a story.

A man is beaten and left for dead on a road. A priest walks by. A Levite walks by. Both of them are the religious insiders, the people the lawyer would have expected to help. Neither of them stops. Then a Samaritan comes down the road.

The Samaritan is the foreigner in this story. The Samaritan is the person the lawyer's people despised. Samaritans were considered ethnically impure, religiously wrong, culturally suspect. If Jesus were telling the story today in the American context, He would swap in whichever nationality the news currently trains people to fear. The Samaritan stops. The Samaritan bandages the wounds. The Samaritan pays for the man's care at the inn and promises to come back and cover anything extra.

Then Jesus turns the question around. He does not ask the lawyer who the beaten man's neighbor was. He asks the lawyer who acted like a neighbor. The lawyer, who cannot even bring himself to say the word Samaritan, mumbles, the one who showed mercy. Jesus says, go and do the same.

That is the parable. The hero is the foreigner. The lesson is that the person the crowd has been trained to fear is the one who does what God requires.

Read that parable and then read the political ads that use Christian language and cast the foreigner as the danger. It is the exact inversion of what Jesus taught. The movement has cast the priest and the Levite as the good guys and the Samaritan as the threat. And it has done it with a cross around its neck.

The Onlooker's Ledger

I keep a ledger in my head as I read. I put what the Bible says on one side and what I watch the movement do on the other. On the immigration page the ledger is not close.

The Bible says leave food in the field for the foreigner. The movement says cut the food stamps and build the wall.

The Bible says the stranger shall be to you as the native. The movement says the stranger is an invader.

The Bible says do not oppress the alien in your wages. The movement says close the factory, deport the workers, and keep the profits.

The Bible says I was a stranger and you invited Me in. The movement says I was a stranger and you told me you had no room.

The Bible says do not neglect to show hospitality, for some have entertained angels. The movement says vet them harder.

I do not have to editorialize on that list. The list editorializes itself.

Where This Points

There is a question forming here that I am not going to answer yet. It is going to sit in the background of every chapter that follows this one, and it is going to come to the surface at the climax of this book.

The question is not, is the movement right about immigration. The Bible has already answered that question and it did not need me to help.

The question is, if a person can read the words on the page and then live and vote and preach the opposite, where do that person's ethics actually come from? Not from the book they are holding up. It cannot be from the book. The book says the opposite of what they do.

Something else is doing the moral work. Something else is telling them who to fear, who to protect, who to send away, who to invite in. Something else is writing the sermon before the Bible is opened.

We will get to what that something is. For now, sit with the gap. Sit with the fact that the most repeated command in the Torah about how to treat the outsider is being violated as loudly as possible by the movement that says it loves the Torah. Sit with the fact that the family at the center of the Christmas story would not be welcome in the country that puts that story on its lawns every December.

The stranger is standing at the border. The book has already told us what to do. The onlooker is only writing down what he sees when the book is closed and the door is shut.