Posted on 12/27/2017 5:42:31 PM PST by ebb tide
It happens just about every year: Social justice warriors try to hijack the story of Jesus and the Holy Family to score political points. They know better than the Nazis and Soviets. Those revolutionaries sought to suppress the holiday outright. Smart radicals don’t try to crush potent symbols and stories that touch the heart. They try to co-opt them.
It works like this. Take the events of sacred history that point to the real supernatural. Then de-Christianize them. Use stories that play on our heartstrings. But retune them to play instead some Party anthem. The most extreme form of this counter-baptism is surely seen in North Korea. There the Communist despots of the Kim family explicitly perverted Christian theology, even the Trinity. They created a potent myth that combined Marxist ideology with crackpot ultra-nationalism and worship of the Leader as an idol.
Less overt but also insidious: Attempts to twist the story of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph into fables of immigration. As I wrote way back in 2003:
It’s common in certain circles nowadays to compare the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt, or their search for a “room at the inn,” to the plight of illegal immigrants. Bunk (as usual). These were no economic refugees, slipping across a border in search of higher carpentry wages. Joseph and Mary were law-abiding and obedient — to Caesar, who ordered them to Bethlehem for a census, and to God, who commanded they flee the tyrant Herod.
They were poor but nobly-born — of the House of David — proud members of a people that spurned intermarriage with alien races, despised other nation’s gods as fictions or devils, and fully expected one day to be a “light unto the gentiles,” a city on a hill, ruled over by a triumphant Messiah who governed the world.
And these two knew their son was the Messiah. They expected him to assume the throne, to reign as priest-king of a newly triumphant race, to drive out the invaders and purge the sacred kingdom of foreign influences. In other words, they were less like new immigrants slipping into the U.S. than like the family of King Louis XVI trying to slip away from the Jacobins.
Or like the Romanovs fleeing the tyrant Lenin.
Pope Francis and others are still spreading this mashed-up message. In his Christmas Message, Pope Francis said:
We see Jesus in the many children forced to leave their countries to travel alone in inhuman conditions and who become an easy target for human traffickers. Through their eyes we see the drama of all those forced to emigrate and risk their lives to face exhausting journeys that end at times in tragedy. … Jesus knows well the pain of not being welcomed and how hard it is not to have a place to lay one’s head. May our hearts not be closed as they were in the homes of Bethlehem.
In the past, Pope Francis has been even blunter. In 2013, he spoke at the Italian town of Lampedusa. (It has has been completely inundated by mostly economic migrants from Africa.) Francis minced no words. He compared those who resist the colonization of Europe by millions of Muslims to King Herod, who slaughtered the infants of Bethlehem.
Catholic News Service drove the point home on Christmas Eve:
Theologian Chad Pecknold pointed out that in Bethlehem, Jesus, Mary and Joseph were not refugees in any sense:
They weren’t rejected from the inn because of their race or religion. There was simply “no room.” Probably because there was a census going on. Nor were they immigrants. They were obeying the law of their country (the Roman empire) by returning to Joseph’s home town.
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Later on, of course, they fled the tyrant Herod. So the Holy Family were briefly political refugees. Kevin Michael Grace described that nicely:
There is almost no similarity whatsoever between the Holy Family and the million-plus Muslims admitted to Europe by Angela Merkel. Maybe I don’t read the New Testament closely enough. But can anyone point out to me where Jesus, Mary, and Joseph:
Most of the Muslims now in Europe weren’t persecuted for their religion, but displaced by a civil war. In any case, the moment they set foot in Turkey (the first safe country), they lost their refugee status and turned into economic migrants.
So there is really only one thing that the Holy Family had in common with Muslims now colonizing Europe: They were a group of people who moved from one place to another.
Cue the world’s tiniest violin.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
Bible is clear that JESUS WAS FROM Jewish Tribe of JUDAH, and his parents were both from same ancestral heritage a few generations back.
God gave their ancestor ABRAHAM, the land that is now ISRAEL...NO, they were not Palestinians. In the taking of the land promised, there were places were the Jews disobeyed God, and let certain persons live, who should have been destroyed. That has become their enemies in claims to land.
Ishmael was by an Egyptian handmaiden of Sarah’s, a sin for Abraham, and not the child of the promise, ISAAC. Isaac is the head of Jews and ancestor of Jesus. Ishmael is recognized as an ancestor of MOHAMMED, prophet of Muslim/Islam.
They were Jews.
Mary and Joseph were on a business trip. They were no more refugees than, say, a librarian who travels to Dallas for the 2018 Texas Library Association conference and then has to rely on Airbnb because none of the Motel 6’s in town has a vacancy.
Nope. They were Jews. Next question.
Were they really all that poor?
Nobody ever mentions the fact that Joseph expected to pay to stay at an inn, and had the money to do so!
Obama’s church claimed that Jesus was a poor black man oppressed by rich Jews. Claiming that Marry and Joseph were Palestinians is as much a lie. Socialists have been trying to infiltrate the church and pervert its teachings since the start of communism. Obama’s church is a prime example of liberation theology, which perverts Christianity into a socialist doctrine.
This clown is clueless.
This has been the MO of the left for a looong time. While they normally say G-D is dead and Jesus is an imaginary friend who’s father is a non existent invisible sky daddy, when it fits their agendas THEN G-D is real and Jesus is a cool dude. Jesus is whatever the left wants him to be AT THE MOMENT. Jesus was a labor organizer. He was a socialist. That supreme intellectual Madonna called him an exhibitionist (Well he WAS naked on the Cross, DUH!) I got into an argument with a bunny hugger (I know, dumbass move on my part, like mud wrestling a pig) who said Jesus was a vegan. To the left one Messiah fits all.
And, this was long before some Bedowins in the 20th Century decided that they were Palestinaian.
Was there a Palestine in those days?
I’ve been watching this happen for a long time. Liberals are very quick to accept Christianity as a worldly, socialist system. To them there is no spiritual message because they don’t believe in it. It’s easy for them to call themselves ‘religious’ in this framework. It basically recreates God in the image of man, instead of the other way around.
you do know that the Palistians are mostly Jews who converted to Christianlty ?
The sacrifice they gave at Jesus’s circumcision indicates that they were poor. (Two doves) The gifts of the Magi later may have alleviated some of the poverty.
They were NOT Palestinians!!
“Were they really all that poor?”
If they wasn’t they lied to God!
Luke 2:24 states Mary offered 2 birds which was the poorest offering that she could have made and still had a burnt offering and a sin offering to atone for her sins.
IAW Leviticus 12 it was to be a lamb and a bird, but if she couldn’t afford a lamb then it would be a pair of birds.
So yes apparently they were that poor.
They were Jews.
They fled into Egypt away from a mass-murdering dictator.
Today’s “palestinians” aren’t Jews, and their leaders are mass-murdering dictators, and their victims are Jews.
This should be fairly easy to figure out ...
The first of the three Hebrew rebellions against Rome ended in 73 AD. With the Siege of Masada, the Emperor Hadrian crushed the rebellion, tore down the Second Temple of Solomon, scattered the Hebrews to the four winds and, just to add insult to injury, renamed Judea as “Syria Palestina.”
Palestine is derived from the name of the Philistines but the Philistines were not Arabs. Arabs, like the Jews, are Semites, descendants of Noah’s son Shem. The Philistines were Hamites, descendants of Noah’s son Ham. In biblical times they also were a seafaring people, possibly from the somewhere in the Aegean. Being seafarers, they traveled widely and created a number of different settlements over the ages, some as far flung as Egypt, that came to be called “Palestine.”
But none of them were in Judea, not until Hadrian renamed it just to vex the Jews, and that didn’t happen until 73 AD.
There are no Palestinians. It’s a manufactured ethnicity. There has never been a nation known as Palestinine governed by a people called Palestinians. The people who now call themselves “Palestenians” just a bunch of Arabs moochers who were kicked out of all the other Arab countries for being bad house guests.
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