Excerpted from the original by Dr. Esther Cho. [1]
Ruth Padilla DeBorst, PhD, is the speaker for the 3rd Annual Berkeley Palmer Lecture. Dr. DeBorst is a well-known Latin American theologian who has been involved in leadership development and theological education for several decades. She passionately pursues ecological justice, authentic community, and participative, contextual forms of theological education. Dr. Padilla DeBorst is currently a visiting faculty at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
Trade is going strong. And it is horrendously shameful and painful. Because what is being exchanged across the US border is not really a what but a who. Many, many “whos.”
17 years ago [now 19 years ago], two savage earthquakes ripped open the land of the small country El Salvador. More than 1,200 people were killed. A million and a half were displaced. Many of them ended up in the US, joining the thousands of unrecognized refugees of the proxy war fought on Salvadoran land by Cold War factions in the 1980s. Socially excluded young people, fending for their lives in inner-city Los Angeles, gathered in violent gangs, which reached into the Salvadoran neighborhoods when those rejected young people were deported to a country they had never known, a country that was unprepared to receive them. Excluded again, with no prospects of work in a country in which the number one source of income is the remittance sent from abroad by family members, these gangs live off crime and extortion, holding entire neighborhoods hostage.
With more than 60 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2017, El Salvador has one of the highest murder rates in the world.[2] Only such levels of violence can explain facts like this: In 2016 alone, 17,512 unaccompanied Salvadoran children were apprehended at the US border as they traveled alone to the US. [3] What would make a mother or father hide their child behind boxes of fruit and ship them off to the unknown if not the conviction that that destiny was safer than the one they risked at home, where they could be inducted by force into the gangs, raped, or killed? Meanwhile, from January to September 2015, the US and Mexico deported more than 34,575 Salvadoran migrants. [4]
The painful circle continues: violence and lack of opportunity force thousands north, while US foreign policy rejects thousands.
Earlier this year [in 2018], the Trump administration announced the cancellation of the temporary status granted some 200,000 Salvadorans to live and work in the US—a decision which will only exacerbate the already tragic cycle of death.
Then in April [of that year], this same administration enacted a policy that separated 1,995 children from their parents in just six weeks.
This surface portrait of the plight of one particular group—El Salvadorans—is but a sample of the reality experienced by immigrants and refugees from pained places the world round.
In most cases, the United States has had a significant hand in producing the conditions that have forced people to move.
What, when confronted by this complex reality, is the role of people living in the United States today, particularly of those who claim to follow Jesus?
I propose that the first step is to ask God’s Spirit to grant us a new set of eyes to see immigrants and refugees in a new light.
A Look at Jesus Is a Good Starting Point
Jesus, the utmost Lord over all creation, left behind his place of honor, and moved into the human neighborhood (John 1:14). From his very conception, he was a person on the move. While still in his mother’s womb, he was carried on a three-to-five-day journey to visit his aunt Elizabeth and back. He was born in a town 70 miles from his parents’ home—about a week’s journey in those days—and then smuggled as a refugee into Egypt. When the threat of murder was over, the family returned, and Jesus was brought up as Jewish Palestinian in Nazareth, a borderland town just four miles from the Greek city of Sephoris, and marked by its influence.
Once he began his public ministry as an itinerant and homeless teacher, preacher, and healer, Jesus appears to have focused mostly on his fellow Jews. But a deeper reading reveals a subversive sensitivity and attention toward uprooted people on the margins, people devoid of home. Lepers ostracized from broader society. Women rejected through divorce, running from town to town to escape stoning. Socially excluded tax collectors. Samaritans, people relocated by force. Crowds of hungry people, displaced by the expropriation and taxation of imperial Rome. And even Roman soldiers, forced far from family as pawns of imperial expansion.
They are not only recipients of God’s favor, though. Jesus’ salvation also recruits them as active agents of God’s purposes. Striking is the fact that Jesus doesn’t just heal, feed, teach, and accompany these people on the move—they are restored to full protagonism as expressions of God’s love in God’s world. For example, Jesus frees the homeless Gadarene who lives among the tombs from the bad spirits that imprison him, and then he becomes “the first gentile missionary to the Gentiles, commissioned by Christ himself.” [5] Over the following decades, it was Christians on the run, the persecuted diaspora, who spread the Good News to the most remote corners of the Roman empire. Jesus saw, loved, and recruited foreigners, outsiders, people on the move, and he confronted all prejudices, practices, and powers that did not allow them a fair place at the table.
Join us for the 3rd annual Berkeley Palmer Lecture on April 10, 2021, as Dr. Padilla DeBorst speaks to us on “Fleeing the Hot Spots: Climate Change, Migration, and Mission.”
[1] This blog post is an excerpt. The original article in its entirety can be found at https://www.missioalliance.org/jesus-moved-into-the-neighborhood-do-we-have-eyes-to-recognize-him/
[2] Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, a Salvadoran historian at Fordham University in New York, cited by Gene Palumbo and Azam Ahmed Jan 9, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/world/americas/el-salvador-trump.html
[3] Gene Palumbo and Azam Ahmed, “El Salvador Again Feels the Hand of Washington Shaping Its Fate,” The New York Times, Jan 9, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/world/americas/el-salvador-trump.html.
[4] https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/El-Salvador-Voices-Concern-Over-US-Mass-Deportation-Plan-20160105-0032.html
[5] Christopher Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2006, p 508.