Christian Identification with Immigrants


Sherman Kuek, SFO
Published in Catholic Asian News
(December 2008 / January 2009 Issue)

“...[F]or you yourselves were once aliens in Egypt” (Leviticus 19.34).

This was God’s justification to Israel for why they were obligated to accord alien residents in their midst with dignity equal to their own (Leviticus 19.33-34). For they, like the current alien residents living in their midst, were once aliens in somebody else’s land.

But now that they had been delivered from the horrors of several hundred years of sojourn in Egypt, God knew that they could all too easily forget the centuries of torment and oppression they had suffered under the hands of the Egyptians. Israel was, after all, a rather forgetful people. And if they had forgotten that they too were once aliens – pendatang – they would eventually forget to treat aliens in their midst in the way they themselves had desired to be treated in the land of Egypt.

For this reason, when God was educating these previously enslaved people on how they were to live as a free people in the wilderness under His divine tutelage, He also reminded them to be utterly kind to the aliens in their midst, “for you yourselves were once aliens in Egypt”. More than just being superficially kind to them, Israel was required to treat aliens in their midst as though they were one of them, “native-born”, equally loved as the Israelites themselves.

A FAITH OF IMMIGRANTS
These instructions from God were more than just a brief reminder to His people. Much more than that, it had formed the entire locus of Israel’s relationship with God upon their deliverance from Egypt. Their obedience towards Him and His commands were premised upon His having been their Deliverer. Even for religious Jews today, these words – “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” – constitute the very first of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20.2-17; Deuteronomy 5.6-21). All the subsequent commandments derive their significance from this first commandment to remember where they came from.

This faith of the Israelites formed the roots from whence came the Christian faith. And hence, just as they were called to remember, so are we. We are required to call to mind the historical realities of our identity as a People of God that our faith is a faith of immigrants. It is a faith of a delivered people.

If God had not delivered us from our sins, we would not have become a people properly belonging to Him. But just as this deliverance would have been extremely difficult for later generations of Israelites to remember, let alone identify with, it is also something difficult for many second-, third-, and fourth-generation Christians to remember. And without this remembrance, obedience to God’s commands may appear “senseless” at some point.

So we are told to remember that the Christian faith – salvation history – is one that is fraught with various events of immigrations; some forced, others voluntary, and yet others divinely instructed. These immigrations very often took place with the Israelites as refugees fleeing either famine, enslavement, or slaughter. And because our faith is a faith of immigrants, God deems it fit that we should know how to treat aliens in our midst. All aliens are to be treated not as pendatang (aliens), but as orang asal (native-born); because we too come from a religious lineage of pendatang, but were delivered by a God who had saved us and given us birth-rights equivalent to that of the orang asal.

But there is another sense in which we are still called to be aliens. We are told in the New Testament that we still have not arrived at where we truly belong, that we are still “aliens and strangers” in this foreign land that we call the world (1 Peter 2.11).

Of course, some of us are so rooted in the scheme of life in this world that our way of life does not even remotely resemble the life of “aliens”. We look just like any other resident of the world, other than that we are regular participants at the weekly Masses in our parishes. Once again, we are asked to call to mind our real identities – we came from a spiritual lineage of immigrants, and we are still asked to live our lives in this present world order as immigrants because we do not belong here.

It is such a struggle having to live as spiritual immigrants, isn’t it?

IDENTIFYING WITH IMMIGRANTS
If at all anyone is able to identify with the plight of the immigrants in our midst, it should be the Christians. The reason for this, as has been explained, is that we have come from a spiritual lineage of immigrants and are ourselves also called to be immigrants in this present scheme of things.

Just as we struggle to preserve our Christian identities in a world which threatens to erode every fabric of our faith, we are called to identify with the painful struggles of immigrants who endeavour to sustain their identities in a society which threatens to obliterate their unique ethnicities by failing to honour their uniqueness. Just as we strive to uphold Christian values in a world that jeopardises our morality, we are called to identify with their intense battles to secure their traditional values in an unfamiliar environment that seems to propagate otherwise.

As people of an immigrant faith, sojourners and aliens in the world, we are reminded to look forward to a future “destination” where we can one day exist in full union with God. Similarly, the immigrants around us have a vision of a desired future “destination” (strangely, many have seemed to indicate that this future destination is called “America”, the land of opportunities!) Even if we may hold that this notion is misperceived, there is a point at which we can identify with their aspirations for a better future. The sense of being on a dynamic journey towards a desired future is something we can connect with.

But just as we are prone to forgetting our imminent future because of routinal distractions, the aliens in our midst too are prone to forgetting their future aspirations, especially when they have been rooted in their interim countries for too long. If we were to hang around these immigrant communities often enough, especially those of the refugees, we would probably hear them reminding one another frequently to not get overly comfortable with the way things were because there was a better future towards which they should press on. But essentially, both they and we struggle with the sense of inertia when bogged down by certain regular routines.

The Christian obligation to identify with and provide care for the aliens in our midst – in full awareness of its accompanying risks – does not stem from a notion of exhibiting a simplistic “Christian niceness”. This obligation is rooted in the reality of God’s love for all humanity, even (or rather, especially) for the outcasts, aliens and strangers. For this reason, a serious assessment of Scriptural evidence regarding aliens and strangers consistently points to the need for a compassionate response from the Christian community.

If we were to take the time to reflect further on this issue, we would certainly discover more points of convergence between the Christian experience of sojourning in this world as “strangers and aliens” and the immigrant experience of subsisting in foreign land. And that would perhaps help us to recover God’s call for us to “treat resident aliens as though they were native-born and love them as [ourselves]” (Leviticus 19.34).

For at the heart of the matter, as we should have come to realise by now, we ourselves are not very much different after all.