Aliens in our midst

One of the most satisfying as also one of the most painful initiatives I have been involved in my long NGO career happened when the Taliban were pretty well entrenched in Afghanistan, 9/11 was a long way away and there were swathes of Afghan refugees in India – mostly educated, middle class and secular minded Afghans reduced to penury by the harsh living conditions imposed by the Taliban. India was not the permanent dwelling place most had in my mind but it was the place of halt for the secular Afghan, escaping from Afghanistan and Taliban friendly Pakistan as they got organized for putting in asylum applications to various Western embassies.

It was a difficult life they lived in the mean while in refugee ghettos, creating a cocooned refugee sub culture of their own. Even as they did the rounds of the UNHCR offices to collect their stipends and the embassy lawns in Chanakya puri with their visa applications, they had carved out a living space of their own which can only imagined. A former army major selling second cameras in the Sunday chor bazaar behind Red Fort, doctors whose qualifications were not recognized in India practicising clandestinely among their own, a woman lawyer rendered unemployed working in an illegal Afghan bakery , their frames and despair filled faces still flash across my mind.

In small, window less rooms they lived and from these rooms their children went to school. Exiled from their homeland and with no clarity as if the children would ever see their watan, the mother land, the parents drew small pictures of hills and deserts on tattered pieces of paper hung up on peeling walls. There seemed to be no money for maps and atlases

Occasionally some one would get a visa but it was not always a cause for celebration. The entire family of course would apply for a visa, but it wasn’t usually the entire family that got the visa. One or the other did- some times the father, occasionally the mother, now and then the oldest child. The joy of it all was crowded out by the thought that the family would separate – two or even three generations that had always lived together – laughed and cried together were about to be separated … possibly for ever. It was not unusual for a family to be separated in another way. Most families had applied for asylum in more than one country. It was not unheard of for spouses to get asylum in different countries as faceless bureaucracies processed papers according to their own legalistic criteria. Aged grand parents would stay back with younger children and babies as other family members scattered around the globe leaving behind emotionally scarred families.

Then 9/11 happened and of course, shortly thereafter allied troops poured into Afghanistan and the Taliban dislodged from power. Hamid Karzai, a liberal and a friend of India was brought to power. The refugees trekked back to liberated Afghanistan and the camps first shrunk and then disappeared.

Our project Umeed, conceived in hopelessness was no longer necessary with hope flourishing all around. Many people as they went back post cards sent greeting cards and even phoned or emailed us thanking Umeed for that it had done for them in some of the darkest hours of their lives. It was a time of great fulfilment, knowing that families would be united again, there would be proper careers for the lawyers and the judges and the teachers, that children could see their own deserts and mountains and not merely see two dimensional pictures on limp walls. It was a euphoric moment of joy. But in the initial days of the project and indeed all through its very existence, we had to be ready to answer many questions – why were we doing this, what was the purpose, what was the reason? Didn’t India, have many problems of its own that needed our time and energy? Of course it had. Specifically then, we had to ask ourself the following questions:

What is the Bible's attitude to foreigners in general?
What is the Bible's attitude to immigrants and refugees in particular?
What do the gospel and the kingdom have to say to our subject?

A superficial reading of the Old Testament could leave the impression that God's purposes are narrowly nationalistic. His covenant with Abraham, and promise to bless his descendants, and his election, deliverance and rule over Israel suggest that the nations are not his concern - except negatively, in the conquest of the promised land when he decrees their annihilation. Indeed, Israel is told not to be like other nations and the prophets are littered with frightening oracles against the nations of divine judgement of the utmost severity. After the exile, Ezra instructed those who returned to divorce their foreign wives. In fact, throughout her history Israel is to maintain a safe distance vis-à-vis the nations in order to protect her own cohesiveness in terms of ethnicity, language, territory, religion and political institutions. So are we left with a negative view of the nations in the Bible? Does the Bible unwittingly encourage xenophobia?

Not at all. The overall theme of the Bible's teaching is summed up in Exodus 22:21, "You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt." Reminding the people of biblical Israel that they had been slaves in Egypt, the Hebrews are enjoined to treat aliens, foreigners and sojourners in their midst fairly and with respect. Leviticus 19:34 echoes and expands upon the Exodus teaching. "The alien who resides among you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God." From the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews we hear, "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing so some have entertained angels unawares."

Why is the matter of the immigrant or the "foreigner who resides among you" such a concern of the Jewish and Christian faiths and what bearing does it have on the current immigration debate in our country? As for the first question, the answer is that God didn't want the ancient Hebrews to forget where they had come from, or how they had gotten where they were, namely, the Promised Land. They had come from slavery in Egypt. They knew what it was like to be exploited and taken advantage of.

It was for this reason that biblical law is remarkably generous towards and supportive of the strangers in Israel. It is acknowledged that such people have no power, and are frequently poor and needy. Yet they are accorded fair and hospitable treatment. Whether assimilating or not, strangers were protected from abuse, especially abuse stemming from patriarchal authority, protected from unfair treatment when employed by Israelites, and protected from unfair treatment in the courts, including justice at the city gate. The example of God is also cited as a motivation, as in Deuteronomy 10:17-19: 'The Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, he shows no partiality, and loves the alien.'
Much after these scriptures were written, in 586 BC Israel as a nation, or strictly speaking the southern kingdom of Judah, was exiled to Babylon. They were not so much refugees, but even worse, deportees; not chased out, but led out or shipped out. The forlorn Israelites sat down by the rivers of Babylon and wept (Ps 137:1), with Jerusalem in ruins and their infants slaughtered. Predicted in Leviticus (26:33) and Deuteronomy (28:64; 30:3-4), lamented in the book of Lamentations, and with Ezekiel and Daniel as exilic prophets, the Old Testament gives much space to this catastrophic experience and future generations of Jews lived under its cloud. Even after the Return, not unlike Jews today who continue to shudder at the memory of the Holocaust, its shadow remains. With only a little overstatement, we could characterise the Old Testament as a book about refugees.

When we come to the New Testament, the obvious question to seek to answer is, what would Jesus do? What did Jesus do is more pressing and fundamental. In short, he did two things.
Jesus broke into history with a kingdom from heaven which encompassed those Israel conventionally thought to be its least likely subjects, namely, the poor, women, children, the socially excluded (prostitutes, lepers) and eventually, gentile sinners like us. Jesus redefined the people of God. 'Many who are first will be last, and the last first' (Mark 10:31; Matt 19:30; Luke 13:30; cf. 20:8), sums up the breathtakingly radical reversal that stamped his work and agenda.
The second thing that Jesus did was to insist that those who acknowledge him as the Christ should care for the poor and the powerless. Each of the four Gospels captures a distinctive feature of the moral vision of Jesus for his people. In Matthew Jesus calls for a surpassing righteousness; Mark sees him challenging us to a heroic discipleship; John focuses on the common life of love Christians are to provide for each other

The example and teaching of Jesus impresses on us a compassionate response to refugees, strangers and the marginalised. We know the heart of the stranger, for each one of us were once lost and estranged from God. The same logic applies to us as it did to Israel. Christians of all people can empathise with foreign strangers. Once we were strangers to God, then having experienced his welcome, we become strangers in another sense - strangers to the world in which we remain. The Christian response of welcoming the stranger, in full knowledge of the attendant risks, is not based on Christian niceness. Rather, it is grounded in God's love for all, even (or especially) for the outcast and the stranger.