Daily Lesson for December 10, 2019

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Matthew 2 verses 13 through 18:

13 When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”
14 So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, 15 where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
16 When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. 17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
18
“A voice is heard in Ramah,
    weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
    and refusing to be comforted,
    because they are no more.”

I don’t know which article of faith is more scandalous, that Jesus was God or that He was a refugee.

According to Christian tradition Jesus was God, and he was a refugee, and therefore if you wanted to find God you had to look amongst the refugees.

This is still true today. If we want to find the Son of Man then we will find him among the refugees. “And I was a stranger and you welcomed me . . .”

This should upend all our judgments and all our suspicions when it comes to refugees. Brutal regimes come to power. They terrorize their own people. The only choice is escape or be killed. Jesus’ family chose to flee. And so when it comes to our response to refugees, it should worry us, absolutely haunt us — not that we might be letting in criminals in — but that we might be keeping Jesus and his family out.