In the first reading Abraham sees three men and runs to greet them, not waiting for them to come and ask for help. This theme is further developed in the book of Exodus when God commands the people,
You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
The word for stranger has a variety of meanings: stranger, foreigner, alien. It refers to a person on the road who turns off, in need of assistance.
The word “wrong” here is a broad term covering a wide variety of ways a person can be mistreated. It may remind us of the golden rule, to treat others as we wish to be treated, not so to anyone else what we would not want done to ourselves.
The word oppress presents the image of literally pressing the person down. We are forbidden from doing anything that makes the alien feel any way lower than us, less than us..
In the resigns today Abraham and Martha are the models with which each of us must mesure our own behavior.
We live in a time when there are many voices who would encourage us to fear. They feed our fear of the stranger, the unknown. As Christians, we are called to be guided, not by the natural, but by the supernatural. We are called to rise above our gut reactions.
Does a country have a right to secure its borders? Yes. But can we use any and all means to do so? No.
As Christians, we should call on our leaders to use only those means which are moral, those means which do not violate the natural rights and basic human dignity of the person. Yes, that complicates the matter and reasonable people can disagree about what is moral and what is immoral. That does not mean that which should not strive for the truth. The truth is that we are required to treat every human being with exactly the same dignity we wish to receive from others. We cannot place a person in conditions we would not find acceptable for ourselves.
At the end of the day, at the end of this life, our attitude toward the stranger, the alien, the foreigner will be one of the many things on which we will be judged. These readings encourgsre us to judge ourselves now, and make changes as needed
