“Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” Matthew 8:20

We are stardust; we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden – Joni Mitchell

The kingdom of God is made up of refugees.

When you start thinking about refugees in the Bible, it’s hard to find anyone who was not, at least at one time, a refugee.

You’ve got the children of Israel in exile numerous times — it was always their fault, but it still happened. Most of the prophets were homeless. I suppose you could say that Adam and Eve (and through them — all of us) are refugees from the garden, and that’s not a joke. We’ve been displaced from the beginning, and we’ve been looking for our home ever since.

But for the clearest example of a refugee in the New Testament you need go no further than Jesus, who grew up in a home in Nazareth, but left there when He started His ministry and never looked back. He and His disciples were vagabonds by all rights for three years. You never hear of them getting together to study the Torah at Jesus’s place.

The Bible says that He left His throne and came as a refugee to the human race. He had a home in heaven but He left it to come to us. He was a refugee from God who came to identify with us, and His identification was with the lowest of the low.

Why? Because He wanted to remind everyone that His kingdom was not of this world. Had He come in earthy power and glory He would have sown confusion and forced His kingdom to vie with worldly, earthly kingdoms for power, but that was never His intent. His kingdom was and is on an entirely different level.

I think that He also identified with the refugee because of empathy. He wanted to understand what it was like to be the lowest, because these were His kind of people.  He was going to make a kingdom out of these folks. (We have to realize, when we see the homeless and the refugee, that these people are closer to the kingdom of God — without even trying — than most of us are.)

The Pharisees rarely invited Jesus over because of the crowd that came with Him. They were embarrassed by these people (like we might have been); Jesus was right at home. His will has always been to lift up the lowly and bring down the proud. He’s building His kingdom and it is not of this world. We may need to adjust some of our thinking, because the kingdom of God is made up of refugees.