THE THINGS THAT YOU'RE LIABLE TO READ IN THE BIBLE
Sometimes I wonder if white Evangelical leaders have even bothered to read the Bible. If they have, they must assume that their followers have not.
Here’s Donald Trump’s “spiritual advisor,” Paula White, defending his kids-in-cages policy: Jesus, she said, “did live in Egypt for three-and-a-half years. But it was not illegal. If He had broken the law then He would have been sinful and He would not have been our Messiah."
The “flight into Egypt” story appears only in the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew’s focus throughout his gospel is on demonstrating, via correlations between Jesus’ life and Old Testament prophecies, that Jesus is the Messiah promised to the Jews. In Matthew’s account of events, Joseph took his wife and baby son to Egypt in order to avoid persecution by King Herod of Judea. Herod lived only until c. 4 AD/CE, at which point Joseph, Mary, and Jesus returned to Judea – fulfilling the prophecy of Hosea, who quoted the Lord as saying “out of Egypt I call my son.
Inasmuch as Judea and Egypt were both part of the Roman Empire, and inasmuch as the notion of illegal immigrant would have to wait a couple of millennia to be born, White is technically correct that Jesus’s presence in Egypt didn’t break any laws.
On the other hand, as an adult, Jesus got in plenty of trouble with the law. As White would know if she read any of the four gospels all the way to the end, thirty years after the flight into Egypt, Jesus was arrested and executed by the Roman authorities.
And seriously, the crucifixion was how Jesus’ earthly mission had to end. You don’t take on the sins of all mankind by dying of old age or getting run over by a drunk driver in a chariot. In order for his death to be redemptive, Jesus had to die a martyr. And in order to die a martyr, Jesus pretty much had to be viewed as an outlaw by the rich and powerful.
The argument that breaking the law is the equivalent of sinning is just stupid and ugly. It’s part and parcel of Jeff Sessions’ invocation of St. Paul's Romans 13 in order to justify ICE brutality. Back in the 19th century, people from Sessions’ neck of the woods used Romans 13 to justify the Fugitive Slave Act. It’s designed to help the rich and powerful sustain the status quo. And as I wrote in an earlier post, Paul himself was eventually arrested by the powers that be and executed as an enemy of the state.
During World War II, the people who hid Anne Frank from the Nazis did so illegally. The Nazis who found her and sent her to die in a concentration camp were law enforcement officers. There’s no question about who was breaking the law. But who were the sinners in that sequence of events?