For You Were Sojourners

Between 1940 and 1944 the people of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a Protestant village on a high plateau in south-central France, hid several thousand refugees — some three thousand of them Jews — in farmhouses and schools, forged their papers, and walked some over the mountains into Switzerland.¹ Asked why, the villagers rarely spoke of heroism. They were Huguenots, descendants of people who had been hunted through those same hills for their faith. They knew what a stranger at the door was, because they had been the stranger.

Deuteronomy is built on exactly that kind of memory. Moses is preaching on the far side of the Jordan, and he opens with a summary: “what does the LORD your God require of you, but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul” (Deuteronomy 10:12). It is a steep list. But before the commands get specific, Moses lays a choosing underneath them. Heaven and the heaven of heavens belong to God, and the earth with all that is in it — “yet the LORD set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them” (Deuteronomy 10:15). The requirement rests on an affection that came first.

Moses will come back in a moment to what that affection must do to a stubborn heart. First, though, he tells us what kind of God does the choosing: he “is not partial and takes no bribe. He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing” (Deuteronomy 10:17–18). A sojourner — Hebrew ger — is the resident alien: no land, no clan, no one obliged to take his side. Notice the two things God gives him, because Israel had just spent forty years receiving exactly those two. Manna every morning (Deuteronomy 8:3), and “your clothing did not wear out on you” (Deuteronomy 8:4). Food and clothing — the very kindness Moses names here as God’s care for the stranger is the kindness Israel has been living on since Egypt. They did not have to imagine what a sojourner needs. They had been eating it and wearing it for forty years.

And the hunger that preceded the manna was itself instruction, as Keller reads it: God let them grow hungry to wean them off lesser breads and teach them what they actually lived on, “that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD” (Deuteronomy 8:3).²

Which brings us back to the line we stepped over. Set between the choosing and the sojourner is a command no one can perform on himself: “circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn” (Deuteronomy 10:16). Tim Keller has noticed how Deuteronomy keeps pressing Israel toward a love it has no power to produce, until near the end the book says plainly that the LORD himself will do the cutting (Deuteronomy 30:6). What the law commands, grace must finally supply.³

So the command, when it comes, comes with a hinge in the middle: “Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19). Not so that they would become God’s people. Therefore — because they already were, loved when they had nothing. And the remembering Moses asks of them is not a mood. When Scripture says “God remembered” his covenant, something characteristically happens next — he comes down, he opens the sea, he brings a people out.⁴ Israel is to remember Egypt in that same active way: recall the night, and then set another place at the table.

Trace the line forward and it arrives at a stranger. He “came to his own, and his own people did not receive him” (John 1:11), had “nowhere to lay his head” (Luke 9:58), and in his own wilderness he answered the tempter with the lesson Israel had been slow to learn — man does not live by bread alone (Matthew 4:4). At the end, outside the city, he was stripped of the one thing a sojourner is owed, while soldiers divided his garments (John 19:23–24). He became the ger so that we who were once “strangers to the covenants of promise” (Ephesians 2:12) could hear, “you are no longer strangers and aliens” (Ephesians 2:19). We were the ones fed and clothed — his body the bread, his righteousness the garment — by a grace that comes down into the ditch to find us.

Therefore — not in order that. No one buys a seat at a table already set. Jesus said the King will say, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matthew 25:35), and there the welcome is the evidence of a kingdom “prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 25:34), not the price of it. So the stranger at the edge of our week — the new family in the back pew, the neighbor whose language we do not share — is not a test to pass. It is an occasion to do, freely and gladly, what was done for us when we had no papers of our own: food, clothing, a chair pulled out. Moses had already warned Israel that the nations would be watching, and that what they would see was a God near enough to answer whenever his people called (Deuteronomy 4:7); Keller takes that to mean our justice is itself a testimony — the way a redeemed people orders its common life is visible evidence of the character of the God who redeemed it.⁵ We love the sojourner because we remember being one, and because the One who took us in has never stopped setting places.