Biblical Hospitality

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word hospitality? For most people, images emerge of entertaining around meals or inviting friends into their homes for a night of fun and games. Now let’s be clear. There is nothing wrong with sharing a meal with friends and family, but genuine, biblical hospitality is much more than entertaining.

One simple distinction between biblical hospitality and entertaining is that the latter puts the focus on the host. In doing so, it can actually become an issue of pride. As the host, we are concerned about what others will think about our home. We wonder, how will our home reflect on us? There is a desire to impress our guests. We want them to like us and the place we live. We worry about making everything just right. If our home isn’t perfectly clean and decorated, how can we possibly entertain guests? This sort of hospitality can easily become more about appearances than persons.

With biblical hospitality, the focus is not on us as hosts. Instead, it is on our guests. Our concern is not on the appearance of our home, but on the needs and concerns of those invited into our homes. What do we have to learn from our guests? What do they have to share? What needs do our guests bring with them that we can address? What promise are they carrying with them that we need to receive? What about our guests can we celebrate during our time together? Soon, we discover the distinction between host and guest proves to be artificial. Our differences evaporate into a mutual sense of being included. (1)

Scripture gives further clarity on the concept of hospitality, as well as its crucial importance. The Bible holds hospitality—especially toward strangers—in high regard. The laws prescribing holiness in the book of Leviticus include reference to hospitality:

When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God (Leviticus 19:33-34).

We are not only to do no wrong to those outside of our community; we are to actively love the “foreigner” as we love ourselves. In this passage, the better translation of “as yourself” (kamocha) is “for he is like you.” We, too, were aliens once—outside the community—yet God treated us as native-born. The point is reiterated in Deuteronomy 10:19: “… you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.”

In the New Testament, this mandate is given with even more force as Jesus teaches in the parable of the sheep and the goats:

Then the King will say to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”

Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?”

The King will reply, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:34-40).

To welcome the stranger is to welcome Christ. “Believer or nonbeliever, attractive or unattractive, admirable or disreputable, upstanding or vile—the stranger is marked by the image of God." (2) Therefore, we are called to love.

The Greek word for “hospitality” in the New Testament makes this perfectly clear. It is the word philoxenia, which is a combination of two words: love (phileo) and the word for stranger (xenos). It literally means “love of stranger.”

Loving the stranger was a vital element in the life of the early church. Numerous passages speak to the importance of hospitality. Just a few include:

Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers (Romans 12:12-13, NRSV).

Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it (Hebrews 13:2).

The overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach (1 Timothy 3:2).

Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling (1 Peter 4:9).

Another aspect of hospitality is important to note. It is not just for the benefit of the other. There is also something extraordinary that is gained when we receive the stranger.

When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you (Luke 14:12-14, ESV).

The practice of biblical hospitality is unique because it reaches out to those who cannot reciprocate. In most cases, when we invite friends into our homes for dinner, there is an expectation that they will return the “favor” and have us in their homes. But the point of this passage is that customary “payback” hospitality is of no great merit to God. The very best hospitality is that which is bestowed, not exchanged. (3)

The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas said the only thing that really converts people at a deep level is seeing “the face of the other.” Welcoming and empathizing with the other leads to the transformation of the whole person. This interchange is prepared to transform both persons—the seer and the seen. (4) In a sense, we need the stranger for our own conversion from our individualism, self-centeredness and our tendencies towards self-preservation and exclusion.

Being included is really at the core of biblical hospitality. If we had to take all of this talk about loving strangers and welcoming people into our lives and homes and boil it all down into one word, it would be the word inclusion. As followers of Jesus, we are called to be radically inclusive people. We should be quick to include others in our lives.

The opposite of inclusion is exclusion, which always involves dismissal and rejection. Can you remember a time in your life when you were excluded? Stop and think for a moment. How did being excluded from the lives and activities of others make you feel? Being left out, rejected by others, is deeply hurtful. The sad reality is that thousands of people live daily lives of exclusion. They are not welcomed—by anyone. They are left to exist at the margins, on the fringes of society, living relationally impoverished lives. It is not right. No one is brought into this world to live a life of isolation. We do not flourish as human beings when we know no one and no one knows us; we do not flourish as human beings when we belong to no place, and no place cares about us. When we have no sense of relationship to people or place, we have no sense of responsibility to people or place. We are created as social, relational beings who are made for community. Hospitality, when rightly understood and pursued, has the power to break the bonds of isolation and exclusion.

Exclusion is not the way of Jesus. But if hospitality is clearly presented in Scripture, and if it gives us the capacity to overcome the relational separation that is so prevalent today, then why do we continue to exclude others? When did we lose the capacity to give and receive hospitality? Why has it virtually disappeared from the life of the church? The reasons are undoubtedly complex, but the greatest enemies of hospitality appear to be fear..

Xenophobia

In sharp contrast to the Greek word philoxenia, which means “love of stranger,” you may have heard the more popular word xenophobia, which is the fear or even hatred of the stranger or foreigner. While there is certainly a clinical expression of xenophobia, there is a level of fear of the stranger that has unfortunately been conditioned in us all over time.

The authors of Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love speak to the damaging effect fear has on our ability to welcome the stranger:

Fear is a thief. It will steal our peace of mind. But it also hijacks relationships, keeping us sealed up in our plastic world with a fragile sense of security. Being a people who fear the stranger, we have drained the life juices out of hospitality. The hospitality we explore here … is not about sipping tea and making bland talk with people who live next door or work with you. Hospitality is a lively, courageous, and convivial way of living that challenges our compulsion either to turn away or to turn inward and disconnect ourselves from others. (5)

The average American, middle-class family has increasingly become a place to achieve safety and security from the “dangers” of secular society. The home has become a stronghold to protect the family from the evils of the world, rather than a place of welcome and hospitality. Writing on the typical American view of the home, Deb Hirsch provides this powerful critique:

This is “our” space, and those we may “invite” into that space are carefully chosen based on whether they will upset the delicate status quo, inconvenience us, or pose a threat to our perceived safety. In other words, visitors, especially strange ones, stress us out. And while this is in some sense culturally understandable, the negative result in terms of our spirituality is that the family has effectively become a pernicious idol. … Culture has once again trumped our social responsibility. In such a situation, missional hospitality is seen as a threat, not as an opportunity to extend the kingdom; so an idol (a sphere of life dissociated from the claims of God) is born.

Our families and our homes should be places where people can experience a foretaste of heaven, where the church is rightly viewed as a community of the redeemed from all walks of life. Instead, our fears restrict us from letting go of the control and safety we have spent years cultivating. (6)

We wrongly assume that one of the greatest needs in our lives is safety. But what we need most is connection and acceptance from other human beings. Locks and fences can never do for our withered souls what genuine friendships can. Fear is indeed a thief. It will steal our ability to forge new relationships. Instead, we must see hospitality as an adventure that takes us to places we never dreamed of going.

Footnotes:

1. Lance Ford and Brad Brisco, Next Door as It Is in Heaven (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2016).

2. James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 245.

3. Ford and Brisco, Next Door as It Is in Heaven.

4. Elder M. Lindahl, “Face to Face,” Summer 2002, accessed December 31, 2015, at www.pietisten.org/summer02/facetoface.html.

5. Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt, Radical Hospitality (Brewster, Mass.: Paraclete Press, 2001), xxii.

6. Alan and Deb Hirsch, Untamed: Reactivating a Missional Form of Discipleship (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2010), 166.