Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Many animals migrate regularly - birds, butterflies, the caribou and the wildebeest are famous. Humans have also migrated from the earliest days, first out of Africa and then over the whole earth. In more recent times migration, whether for exploration or exploitation or both, forced or unforced, has remained a feature of human existence. How we react to it is a defining characteristic of our societies at this very moment.

The reality of migration and the associated disparities of power and wealth are found in the origin stories of every people, from the Mongols of Central Asia, to the Vikings, to the people of Polynesia, and all the competing tribes of Europe through to our current age. This reality was a foundational characteristic of the people that God called in the desert lands of the Middle East, a wandering people who often also experienced forced migration at the hands of more powerful neighbors. So the story of migration and power is built into the story of salvation from the beginning.

We hear in the earliest books of this people how their God instructed them to handle this reality: “You shall not molest or oppress an alien” and to recognize that this God was on the side of the poor and the powerless (what became known very much later as ‘the preferential option for the poor’) - Exodus 22:20-26. This orientation was not based on singling out a particular class or group of people for special treatment but reflected the fundamental equality of all people in the sight of this God - so unlike the gods worshipped by others, then and now. Jesus, in drawing on this ancient understanding of the Jewish people and making it fully universal, tied it to the simple principle that we should behave to others as we would wish them to behave towards us - a principle of universal equivalence and reciprocity - Matthew 22:34-40.

This teaching runs counter to basic human instincts - to protect what we have, to fight or run away when we feel threatened, to be suspicious of those who appear different. What the people of Israel learned during their migrations and all their trials was that their God expected something different from them. What Jesus taught his disciples, and told them to proclaim to the whole world, was that to be free of such destructive instincts, to be saved, we have to love a God who is fully outside of us. We also must recognize that we are equal in every way before Him. Giving ourselves up to the other, however different they may be, is the journey of a lifetime - it is a journey that returns us where we started, held in the love of our Creator.