Knowing the Migrant Savior

("Turn to Clear Vision", by C. Lorance)

I'm thinking about what it means to "know Christ".  

I think we (Western, evangelical types) tend to mean by this a kind of emotional and intellectual adherence to certain theological positions/statements.  Maybe even really loving those truths and singing songs about them and stuff like that.  But, the Incarnation and Crucifixion were more than mere theological realities ... they were lived experiences of Lord Jesus.  The migrations and the sufferings of the Savior are a part of who He is (kind of a big part) and I am wondering if "knowing" Him in these things is even possible for the perennially comfortable, albeit theologically orthodox crowd who has never known the loss of displacement, the pain of culture loss, and the agony of physical torment.  Is there a sense in which one who knows nothing of orthodox confessions of faith or acceptable theological systems may nevertheless "know" something of Jesus, and that quite intimately, because they too were a migrant and they too suffered?  

Look at the Crucified Foreigner, pierced and bleeding impossibly far from home.  Does he look more like a suburban evangelical shopping at the local Lifeway for just the right Jesus fish to stick on his late model Camry or rather like the Syrian Muslim woman who was survived rape, torture and an impossible trek through the desert to bring her children to the relative safety of a refugee camp in Jordan?  I'm not saying that she knows enough about the Savior.  I'm just saying that maybe we don't either.  I'm just saying that perhaps there needs to be a bit more give and take in mission than we tend to allow for -- that the objects of our proclamation may themselves have something important to proclaim about Christ which we ignore to our own peril.