Doctors Without Borders and Judgment Day

 Doctors Without Borders and Judgement Day

When I was a lad, I was taught that one of God’s attributes is omniscience, that He is all knowing. Let us hope it isn’t true and let us at least hope that He is unaware of Doctors Without Borders. 

In Matthew 12:41 – 42 Jesus says that at the Judgment the people of Nineveh and the Queen of the South will condemn the people of Jesus’ time and place because they responded to the lesser lights of Jonah and Solomon, while the people who heard and saw Jesus rejected the Light of all lights. 

Doctors Without Borders, encompassing doctors, nurses, and other volunteers from a multitude of nations, go wherever a medical need is, often risking their lives, sometimes suffering casualties and death, enduring privations and seemingly impossible working conditions, not seeing borders or barriers between nations and peoples, but rather seeing suffering humanity. 

Yet the professing Church of Jesus Christ has not only built borders and barriers within nations, with traditions and denominations and congregations sealing themselves off from one another, but it has built national and political borders and become the servant of political, economic, and national agendas. Rather than rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's, the professing Church is rendering to Caesar what is God’s.

How can we speak of sending missionaries and engaging in short-term mission trips, when we will not serve the many peoples who have come to the United States to escape the horrors of war, crime, famine, oppression, and deprivation? Is it not incongruous to speak of building schools or sending clothes or food or medical supplies to other lands if, when the people of those lands are in our own communities, we do not know them and will not get to know them and extend ourselves to them with the love of Jesus Christ?

Jesus brings the nations to us, and we reject the nations. Many of these people are our brothers and sisters in Christ, all of these people are made in the image of God. Many of these people are already members of the Body Christ, all of these people are part of our family of humanity, the family made in the image of God (Ephesians 3:15). 

Of course, our behavior should not surprise us, for within the United States there are social and economic and racial and ethnic barriers and borders within society and within the professing Church – so in one sense we are simply treating “outsiders” as we already treat those within our national borders. 

What will historians say about us?  

Will they say that God sent the people of the nations to the United States, and that the United States rejected them? More importantly, will they say that God sent people to the Church in America, and that the Church told God to take them back? 

Are we not the essence of “Not in my backyard”?

More importantly what will God say? 

This is a question easily answered. “I was hungry, and you gave Me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me nothing to drink; I was a stranger, and you did not invite Me in; naked and you did not clothe Me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit Me…Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me” (see Matthew 25:31 – 46). 

Well, let us hope that God is not omniscient. 

Let us hope that Doctors Without Border does not appear at the Judgment to accuse us, for we will have no defense.