Jesús Salvador Sánchez

For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes.  He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt. – Deuteronomy 10:17-19

 

 

He came one day, sneaking across the border. Not much more than a toddler, he could still feel the fear in his parents. The tiny desert town where he was born had become a place of violence so they had fled. In the middle of the night they had run, just ahead of the murder squads. Undocumented and alone, they had walked for weeks, seeking out the hidden trails only animals and criminals used. Finally they crossed the river and entered the country they hoped would be a refuge.

 

He came with practically nothing. His father worked in construction so he got a job where the boss didn’t mind that he was an immigrant. But always, they were outsiders. Strangers in a strange land.

 

An illegal.

 

Fleeing his violent homeland.

 

Do you know this child?

 

You should. You’ve heard this story a million times. Every year at Christmas we talk about shepherds and wise men, about a bad king and the flight to Egypt. Every year we hear it and somehow every year fail to realize that right there in the Greatest Story Ever Told, the hero is an illegal alien.

 

Good thing for the Sunday school story books nobody caught Jesus at the border, stuffed him in a warehouse then sent him back home to take his chances with Herod’s goons.

 

Whenever I hear decent God-fearing people talk about shipping all those illegals back where they came from, or tell jokes about wearing a border-patrol hat to get a better spot in line at Walmart, it makes me crazy. The Inerrant Word of God specifically prohibits mistreating foreigners (or sojourners or aliens, depending on your translation) and even commands the people not to harvest all the food they grow so widows and – hey look at that! – foreigners will have something to eat. It goes even further and tells people to use part of their tithe so the priests, poor, and aliens can eat until satisfied.

 

Geez, that just sounds like a handout. Good thing this is one of those issues the Bible only mentions once so we can gloss right over it. No? It’s in there 18 different times? Huh. It’s almost like it’s important to God that we treat immigrants well and help them out. Weird.

 

To those who say we should take care of our own and stop all these horrible poor people from using up our resources, I say we have a God who rains bread in the wilderness and make water gush out of dusty old rocks. There is always enough.

 

To those who fear people because they are different, I say perfect love chucks that nonsense right out the window.

 

And I will say this too: racist Christians are not Christians.

 

Not.

 

At all.

 

My sister-in-law and her family just moved to Spain from Nicaragua to find work. She and her husband have been out of a job for months now, unable to find anything, so they went to live with a relative in Spain. They left knowing they would not be getting office jobs like they used to have. Ivette will use her college degree in business administration to clean people’s dirty houses. And what was everyone’s main piece of advice to her as they sent her off? Prepare yourself for discrimination.

 

How terribly sad.

 

How terribly unlike the way things should be.

 

My voice is very small and hardly anyone will read this, but I want it on record that I am for immigrants. I will love them and defend their cause because God does those things too.

 

There are children at the border of my country, running from the violence in their homelands, looking for refuge.

 

Just like Jesus.