ABSTRACT
Migration has become one of the major and defining phenomena of modern times, especially in the United States, which receives roughly 19 percent of the world’s migrant population each year. Most of the biblical books were written in the context of migration and from the perspective of migrants. Ironically, several New Testament texts have been taken out of context and employed to justify oppressive laws and dehumanizing practices against migrants. This chapter analyzes several New Testament texts, especially from Matthew’s Gospel, to explore biblical bases for hospitality to strangers and for attenuating xenophobia. It argues that Jesus’s journeys and mission in Matthew frequently disrupt borders to the extent that disruption becomes the norm rather than the exception. The Gospel moves from embrace of strangers to ambivalence about them to seeing them as manifestations of the divine. The chapter builds upon the concept of theoxenia—divine stranger—in Greek mythology, which views the foreigner as a manifestation of Zeus, a protector of foreigners. The positive depiction of strangers, which one finds also in other books of the Bible, both in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament, should be seen as a call to welcome strangers predicated upon the early church’s identity and self-perception as a displaced community. The motifs of displacement and border crossing that became the locus of early Christian identity provided—and should continue to provide—theological and ecclesial bases for Christian embrace of strangers.
