The world of today is full of refugees. We live among thousands of "guest-workers" driven by need to work as unwanted aliens in the affluent Egypts o… - George Soares-Prabhu

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The world of today is full of refugees. We live among thousands of "guest-workers" driven by need to work as unwanted aliens in the affluent Egypts of the Western world. We hear of tens of thousands of political refugees hunted out of their homes, to sit hopeless and forgotten, by the rivers of dingy Babylons in the vast refugee camps of Palestine or Cambodia. We know of the many million victims of caste or race discrimination, who suffer as harassed aliens in their own land, living a constantly threatened life in the "harijan" (ex-untouchables) quarters of half a million villages in India, or the segregated black townships of South African cities. We rub shoulders with hundreds of millions of the desperately poor, denied access to the "land", eking out a precarious existence on the margins of their society in the endlessly sprawling shanty towns of the Third Word or the squalid "inner cities" of the West. For all of them, and for us living among them, the story of Jesus in Egypt read in this way may cease to be just another Christmas story and become a Christmas gospel of challenge and of hope.