Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish

FR MICHAEL BIBLICAL IMAGERY

(Fr Michael Boakye Yeboah: Vice Rector of St Gregory Seminary, Kumasi-Ghana)

ALIENS

An alien can be defined as a foreigner, especially one who is not a naturalized citizen of the country where he or she is living. In 2011 I served as a chaplain of the immigrant Catholic community in Rome while I was studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University. I came into contact with some young immigrants who had crossed the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea to seek for a better life in Europe. In their accounts I sensed the hospitality and hostilities they encountered as they made that dreaded journey from various locations on the Western Coast of Africa. Some settlers on the Desert know the challenges travelers face in their sojourn on the desert so they normally give them water and other basic needs while other bandits on the route seize the opportunity to rob them of their little money reserved to pay boat “Captains” on the Mediterranean shores of Tunis or Algiers.

Travelers have always had the mixed experience of hospitality and hostilities. More than a century and half ago when travelers from various European countries made their way to North America for greener pastures they had similar experiences. These experiences take us further back to the ages and one of such examples is the one the author to the book of Exodus tells us about. God knowing the plight of aliens reminded the Israelites to treat aliens well because they were once aliens in Egypt.

The First Reading brings home the Old Testament’s teachings on the importance of love of neighbour. It does so by recalling not only that Israel kept the first commandment, love of God, but also that Israel owes its entire existence to God’s love, the love that brought Israel out of Egypt. When they were strangers in Egypt God showed the Israelites the sort of love one gives to one’s own. With this memory refreshed, Israel is now supposed to deal equally lovingly and protectively with the stranger, the poor, widows, and orphans. This early text from Israel’s “book of the covenant” helps us anticipate the concluding text of the New Covenant: “If you have done this to the least of these my brothers, you have done it to me.” The first love God bestowed on me by giving me the grace to be created by him and to be his child obligates me to reveal this divine love to the least of my brothers in deeds as well as in words.

The Gospel also place premium on love of God and neighbour. We may well say that here Jesus laid down the complete definition of religion. Religion consists in loving God. The verse which Jesus quotes is Deuteronomy 6:5. That verse was part of the Shema, the basic and essential creed of Judaism, the sentence with which every Jewish service still opens, and the first text which every Jewish child commits to memory. It means that to God we must give a total love, a love which dominates our emotions, a love which directs our thoughts, and a love which is the dynamic of our actions. All religion starts with the love which is total commitment of life to God.

The second commandment which Jesus quotes comes from Leviticus 19:18. Our love for God must issue in love for others especially aliens. But it is to be noted in which order the commandments come; it is love of God first, and love of others second. It is only when we love God that other people become lovable. The biblical teaching about human beings is not that we are collections of chemical elements, not that we are part of the brute creation, but that men and women are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27). It is for that reason that human beings are lovable. The true basis of all democracy is in fact the love of God. Take away the love of God, and we can look at human and become angry at those who cannot be taught; we can become pessimistic about those who cannot make progress; we can become callous to those who are cold and calculating in their actions. The love of humanity is firmly grounded in the love of God.

To be truly religious is to love God and to love those whom God made in his own image; and to love God and other people, not with a vague sentimentality, but with that total commitment which issues in devotion to God and practical service of others. By showing kindness to aliens, some have entertained angels.