Christmas partisanship, in which God sides with refugees

The Gospel of Matthew recounts the story of Mary and Joseph fleeing from Judea to Egypt to escape from King Herod's order to kill all male infants under age two in the area of Bethlehem to eliminate the Messiah who had just been born there.

"De vlucht naar Egypte" (The Flight Into Egypt")

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Biblical scholars generally regard this as a mythological element of the story, because there is otherwise no historical substantiation of such an incident, also known as the Massacre of the Innocents, taking place at that time. And the story in Matthew has King Herod learning about the birth of the Messiah from the three wise men from the East telling Herold about it, which is also a mythological element of the story. The Three Wise Men are warned in dreams not to go back to Herod in Jerusalem after seeing Baby Jesus in Bethlehem.

Matthew also cites Jewish messianic prophecies in which the Messiah would come out of Egypt in this context. (The story of the birth of Jesus and the flight to Egypt appear in the first two chapters of the Book of Matthew.)

The German theologian Eugen Drewermann treats mythological elements as legitimate parts of Christian theology in the "depth-psychology" approach he applies. So he discusses the flight into Egypt and the massacre of the innocents as legitimate elements reflecting the reality - not of the specific historical events in the story itself, but of the fallen world in which we live. In the first volume of his Das Matthäus-Evangelium: Bilder der Erfüllung (1992), he writes about the centrality to the Christian message of striving to ultimately do away with war and to reduce violence against others.

And he reads the Christmas story in that context:

The message of Christmas in the sense of Matthew's Gospel would not be difficult to understand [in Drewermann’s perspective]. It would just be important to follow the images of one's own dreams as consistently as the "magicians" [the Three Wise Men] do. Warned by the message of an angel, they sense the danger posed by "Herod" and they "escape" from him back to their homeland. If there were only people who blindly followed the evidence of humanity like the magicians, many things that we still consider quite normal and correct today would not be possible. And yet it is necessary to save the divine life in us and literally flee from "King Herod". It is better to spend long years as if in exile, like strangers in the midst of an almost incomprehensible world, than to want to keep our "home" at the price of un-life, where there has no longer been "home" for a long time. [my translation]

This portion of the Christian story in Matthew is not just a way of giving a mythological aura to the story of the birth of Jesus. It is a polemic for refugees against those who do violence to them. In this view, the Christian faith is partisan in the sense of defending the former against the latter.

So the actions now being taken by at the border of the supposedly Christian nation of Poland, actions that have been backed by all other nations of the European Union that claims to be the defending of democratic and "European" values derived from Christianity, needs to be seen in that perspective: Anna Alboth, Helping refugees starving in Poland’s icy border forests is illegal – but it’s not the real crime Guardian 12/08/2021.

Other predominately Christian nations like the USA and Australia would do well to rethink their current policies on refugees in this light.