On doors and shores and sides of roads
The refugee crisis is as “every bit awful as the headlines portend”
I stared at the headline for a while in mute silence: “Austrian police say up to 50 migrants’ bodies found in truck.”
It’s the kind of headline that you read and think, “whatever awful realities will unfold underneath those words, they surely shouldn’t be nicely filed there on the side bar of a website, right underneath news of Celine Dion returning to perform in Las Vegas or the latest round of ‘promises’ being served up by Canadian politicians on the election trail today.” They shouldn’t be nicely filed anywhere.
But there they are. And the story is every bit as awful as the headline portends. Worse, actually.
In the day since I first saw the headline, the number of dead has risen to 71. And there have been arrests made—human smugglers who apparently cared so little about their “cargo” that they allowed them to suffocate, agonizingly, in the back of a truck on the side of an Austrian road. Children, women, men, whose last memory on this earth will be of gasping for air and pounding on the side of a truck box.
The refugee crisis worsens by the day. Europe doesn’t know what to do. Canada mostly sits idly by, choosing its words carefully, cloaking inactivity in the vagaries of “matters of security” and unmet promises to resettle paltry numbers—comparatively speaking—of refugees in our nation by 2014… or 2015… or 2017.
And there are times when the response is at least partly understandable—at least for Europe. How do they accommodate so many refugees? How do nations like Greece, Macedonia, and Italy deal with the daily arrival of people—so many people!—with nothing, relying simply on the mercy of strangers? What do they do when their own economies are already lying in ruins? How can they care for tens and hundreds of thousands of hungry, desperate people, when they already have so many problems of their own?
I’m not an expert on politics or public policy. But I do read and tell stories for a living because I am convinced that good stories are our best teachers. And one of the best and most difficult stories that I often read was told by Jesus.
There was a man lying on the side of a road, broken and bleeding, desperate for help. Jesus doesn’t tell us what sort of man he was. Maybe he was a shady character, maybe he had committed a crime, and maybe he was one of those “feral humans” that’s always causing problems for the “civilized” folks. Maybe he was a refugee. We don’t know.
All we know is that this man was lying on the side of the road. And that a couple of religious people passed right on by. And that it was, in the end, a Samaritan of all people—a dirty half-breed, an idolatrous piece of trash, according to many good religious types—who bandaged his wounds, found him somewhere to stay, and paid the bill.
But Jesus, we protest, that’s one guy! What if there were hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people lying in the ditch? We don’t have the infrastructure…We don’t know how they would fit in… They’re so different from us…We can’t do it, we can’t be responsible for them…They need their own countries to deal with them…Who’s going to pay the bill?
And what would Jesus say? I don’t know, exactly. Jesus can be unpredictable, hard to figure out at times. But I’m willing to bet that whatever His response sounded like, words like “neighbour” and “mercy” would feature prominently. And probably something to the effect of “go and do likewise.”
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