We’ve
entered into Holy Week, the most significant time on the Christian liturgical
calendar. But before I talk about it, I suppose I’d better talk first about the
week before.
The week
before saw President Trump begin what seemed to be a comprehensive overhaul of
this immigration policy by making sweeping changes to his immigration strategy.
Kirstjen
Nielsen, head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), resigned after enduring
criticism from the President, as did Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
acting head Don Vitiello.
‘Ron's a good man’, Trump is quoted as saying, ‘but we're
going in a tougher direction. We want to go in a tougher direction.’
Nielsen had likewise been regularly criticized by the
President for not being aggressive enough.
Considering that both of these people have been overseeing this
administration’s chaotic, cruel fiasco of separating migrant parents- legal or
illegal- from their children, then deporting large numbers of the parents
without their children, then not documenting the children’s whereabouts, and then announcing it might take upwards of
two years to reunite them, one can only shudder and wonder what the President
means when he talks of a ‘tougher direction’.
The President is in a quandary and is striking out like a
hysterical child. Using cruelty as a deterrent hasn’t worked; people are still
fleeing poverty and rampant violence in Central America. Now what?
‘Get crueler’ seems to be the answer…
We’re seeing a massive human migration. A crisis of the
magnitude that the US is currently enduring at the southern border require
levels of leadership, strategic thinking, purpose, authority, and vision that
the President has never given any indication of having.
The President keeps threatening to seal the border, but
walls and locks won’t solve the problem of people fleeing poverty and violence
and asking for asylum. It’d be like locking the doors of a hospital during a
flu epidemic in the hopes that people will stop getting sick.
He’s threatened to cut off aid to the Central American
nations the people are fleeing from… denying funds to programmes that are
working to alleviate poverty and address criminal violence. I am not making
this up.
‘The system is full’, the President said on a recent trip to
the border’, ‘we can’t take you anymore. Whether it’s asylum. Whether it’s
anything you want. It’s illegal immigration.’
So… it’s clear that the President doesn’t know the
difference- or refuses to make a distinction- between an illegal act (crossing
the US border without a valid entry visa) and a legal act (presenting one’s
self at the US border and asking for asylum).
He doesn’t know the difference between a criminal and a
victim… and it’s becoming clear that anyone who tries to explain the difference
to him is sacked.
All of this shows- in the President, much of his
administration and his supporters- a lack of empathy, and for a bunch of people who bluster about how Christian they and their version of America are, that's a problem.
Empathy is markedly different from sympathy, which is
feeling pity or sorrow for another’s misfortune.
Empathy involves the ability to understand the feelings of
another, to feel what they must be feeling, to be able to place yourself in
their experience.
What must it be like to live without security, without
safety, to have no options?
What must it be like to have to flee, to flee terror and
violence, to grab what you have and run?
Most Americans- and certainly the majority of white, middle-class
Americans- have never had to flee- they’ve never fled poverty, disease, war, or
a nightmarish combination of all of three.
The radio, television, or word of mouth has never broadcast
to them, ‘we are coming, and if you are still in the city by morning, we will
kill you, you and your families.’
Most Americans have never had an armed group show up at
their door, shoot the husband, rape the wife, and steal the TV.
Worse, many Americans have utter contempt for those people who have had
to flee.
‘Why don’t they improve their own country? Why don’t they
stand and fight? I would! Why do they expect help from me? Go home and take
care of yourself!’
I and my colleagues who have done post-conflict work in
places like Northern Ireland, Rwanda, the Balkans… we can introduce you to
people who have been forced to flee. We can tell you their stories- of torture,
rape, the death of their children, siblings, or entire families;
Of losing your home, of ending up in another part of the
world;
Of not being welcome;
Of being shown no empathy…
The God of the Bible is an empathetic God.
‘I have certainly seen
the oppression of my people… I have heard their cries of distress… Yes, I am
aware of their suffering’ (Exodus 3:7);
‘When (Jesus) saw the
crowds… he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless,
like sheep without a shepherd’ (Matthew 9:16);
‘You keep track of all
my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded
each one in your book’ (Psalm 56:8).
Holy Week is the culmination of Jesus’s incarnation, the ultimate
cosmic action of empathy on the part of God- to become the sufferer, the hungry, the oppressed, the fleeing…
There is no way to be a Christian without identifying Christ
in one’s neighbour, particularly that neighbour who is suffering or in need.
Once again, we are brought face to face with the true nature
of the Gospel- radical, revolutionary, transformative.
By
fostering a theology of empathy, we align ourselves with God’s heart for
justice and the inherent worth of every human being that we see throughout the
biblical text culminating in the incarnation of Jesus- becoming human to save
and empower humanity.
Biblically,
the antithesis of a theology of empathy is hard-heartedness:
But
because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up ill for yourself
on the last day when God's righteous judgment will be revealed (Romans 2:5)
They are
darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the
ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart (Ephesians
4:18)
A Gospel of empathy and compassion stands as the antithesis of
the mindsets behind the current rise of far-right, nativist, and nationalist movements around the globe, and
acts as a theological resistance to it. In fostering it, we expose the current
rise of small-minded and cruel actions of (to name but a few) Trump at the southern border,
Netanyahu in the Palestinian territories, China’s growing racist repression of
ethnic Uigers, and the targeting of Muslims after 9-11 up to the present
day.
All of
these oppressors, repressors, and marginalizers rely on relentless ‘other-ing’,
rejecting a common humanity, and focusing on ‘us’, ‘our’ needs, ‘our’ agenda, ‘our’
culture and the zero-sum idea that a gain for ‘them’ is a loss for ‘us’…
In Christ’s
incarnation, God becomes wholly ‘other’, the ultimate action of empathy.
Christ made
himself human, and not simply human but crucially, in our historical and
political context, he made himself a migrant at the southern border;
A
Palestinian in the occupied territories and Gaza;
A Uiger in
China;
A demonized
Muslim ;
A bullied
transgender young person;
A refugee
in a European city…
If we
cannot summon empathy for these situations and turn that empathy into action, we
do not know Christ and our Christianity is nothing but a nativist cult.
Let this
Holy Week be a long reflection on a theology of empathy, and may that
reflection become resistance…
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