Rev Dr Timothy Bradshaw,
Oxford University theology department

Scores of young men packed into boats and risking life and limb to reach Europe from Libya, hundreds drowning.

This horrifying spectacle has shocked us as we watch the TV news.

Here are Africans trekking to the Libyan sea port trying to gain a place where they can have a good standard of living in every way, desperate for this chance.

This is but one piece of the huge jigsaw of mass migration across the globe.

Larger and even more desperate groups of people are displaced in the Middle Eastern conflicts.

Unspeakable crimes are being committed on captured women by Islamic extremists, Yazidi girls as young as eight raped and sold by IS as sex slaves, according to an official report citing eyewitness testimony to the most systematic instances of sexual slavery in this century.

Such horrors mean the mass flight of tribes of people wherever they can escape to.

Recently groups of Ethiopian Christians were ritually beheaded by that militia, illustrating the deadly threat to its victims and the desperate need to flee.

Angelina Jolie, special envoy for the United Nations (UN) High Commission for Refugees, expressed her passionate anger to the UN for inaction in the face of the plight of refugees, running into millions.

More than 3.8 million Syrians have fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt, according to the UNHCR, while another 7.6 million Syrians are displaced inside the country.

At least 1.8 million Iraqis were also displaced last year by violence triggered by the Sunni militant IS onslaught, said Ms Jolie.

Yes, she is surely right, this is a crisis and a scandal. But what can the UN and the West do about it?

Military intervention arguably helped trigger this explosion. Europe and the US face resistance to more inward migration flows. This seems a nightmare with no solution. Often commentators speak of such war and flight as "biblical", and the Bible’s narratives contain many stories of flight and escape from terror.

Moses led his people from slavery in Egypt to the land of Canaan, but there they in turn drove out the locals.

Abraham previously set out from what is now Iraq to follow God’s call to Egypt.

The Old Testament tells of deportations to Assyria and Babylon, and of miraculous return to Jerusalem.

Jesus’ parents were harassed by the Roman government to journey to be registered for taxation.

Roman persecution of Christians led to flight and ethnic cleansing.

The horrific Armenian Massacres of 1915 of a million people by the Ottoman Turks have just been commemorated.

Jesus commented on this grisly reality of war, destruction and flight as he sat on the Mount of Olives, looking down at the great Temple of Jerusalem, in Mark Chapter 13.

He rightly predicted that temple would be destroyed he predicted and some 40 years later, as , rightly as the Roman legionsand some 40 years later the Roman legions savagely put down a Jewish rebellion in 70 AD.

Wars, famines, militarism, natural disasters. These, said Jesus, were part of history.

He did not teach a wonderful progression of humanity into serenity and world peace, rather he called for faith in God despite such hardships, many resulting from human sin.

The very last book of the Bible, Revelation, full of symbolism, points similarly to ‘The four horsemen’, militarism, war, famine and death, raging over the world.

But the one who really will conquer is ‘The Lamb’, symbolising Jesus.

He absorbed violence with no retaliation. He offered love to the outcast, homeless and sick.

And that Lamb represents the heart of God.

People of faith will look at the needs of the desperate through these compassionate eyes and try to help in whatever ways they can, however small, to improve their conditions.