Hospitality is not a new or foreign idea. For many of us, the word hospitality likely conjures up images of southern grandmothers setting picture perfect place settings in sterile white homes, or perhaps your mom telling you to clean your room before guests come over. While these might be common cultural associations with hospitality, neither of these images, or ones like it, seem to communicate the ancient core of hospitality found within the Christian tradition.
Rather than a cultural nicety or polite obligation, hospitality in the Christian life is the very celebration of our soul’s embodiment and the extension of Christ’s welcome and love to our neighbor. For the Christian, hospitality is the recognition of the brokenness and needs of the people around him coupled with the desire and motivation to meet these needs without grumbling. It is openly and unreservedly inviting others into one’s life simply because of their value before the living God.
The command for hospitality can be found throughout both the Old and New Testaments. Beginning in Leviticus, God commands the Israelites that “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 19:34). The Israelites are instructed to welcome the foreigner with hospitality because they were once foreigners who had been brought near by their God. Hospitality receives its basis from the character of God as One who welcomes the outsider and brings His people near.
In the New Testament, Jesus’ teachings are filled with the exhortation to show hospitality, particularly to the most vulnerable and outcast in society. For Christ says that when hospitality is offered to the least of these, it is being shown also to Himself. Likewise, when it is withheld, it is withheld from Himself (Matthew 25:35-40). Clearly, hospitality is important to God, and its absence is grievous. For when we extend hospitality to those outside, we join in the work of a God who became flesh, died, and rose again in order to save and welcome the lost.
Hospitality receives its basis from the character of God as One who welcomes the outsider and brings His people near.
I came to see the significance of Christian hospitality while hiking the Camino de Santiago in Northern Spain. For all the beauty, adventure, and history of the trip, one daily occurrence sticks out to me as I recall my time on the trail. Every afternoon, after arriving at the hostel for the night, nearly all of the other pilgrims on the trail would walk to the nearest tavern and sit at a long table together, laughing and recounting the joys and mishaps of the day and learning each other’s stories. And every afternoon, my hiking partner and fellow English speaker and I would sit at a nearby table and watch as friendships began and flourished among these Spanish speakers.
We longed to be a part of the community and camaraderie of the table, but because of our language barrier, we were never invited. Never being on the outside of a language barrier, I felt this longing to belong in a new way. I felt strongly the perennial pains of being an outsider and not invited to the table, pains which seem to especially plague our current generation. For we are an isolated people, desperate for assurance that we are welcomed and accepted. We long for a seat at the table. We fear deeply that our brokenness excludes us from the table.
The practice of hospitality meets this deep longing with grace and compassion.
What a mysterious beauty that the living God would create His people with the need to eat, with the ability to make tables, with the creativity to cook delicious meals, and with the longing to sit around the table with fellow pilgrims to rest along the journey of this life.
Often, in our attempts to show the incomprehensible love of God, we end up doing nothing at all, for how could we possibly display the depth and perfection of the love of God? But when we seek to show hospitality, providing for the physical needs of the physical people around us, we honor the embodiment of God’s image in the people around us. We rejoice in the glorious mystery of the Incarnation, God dwelling with us. We choose to be people who proclaim Christ’s descent to earth as the greatest mystery and greatest gift we could ever know.
We are an isolated people, desperate for assurance that we are welcomed and accepted. We long for a seat at the table. We fear deeply that our brokenness excludes us from the table.
This is indeed the mystery of the incarnation: that the living eternal God would condescend to the form of a man and eat with sinners and tax collectors. The gospel cannot remain abstract and theoretical in our minds when our Savior knew the painful experience of hunger and the beautiful satisfaction of a meal enjoyed with His closest friends. Rather, this gospel is found in invitations of hospitality to the least of these, from sinners who know they have been freed from shame and invited to the wedding feast of the Lamb.
The Christian relies on the true origin of hospitality in order to be able to invite freely and graciously. Our welcome to the greatest table, of which we “are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs from underneath” (Book of Common Prayer), makes the welcome we extend to the hurting world a cosmic participation in the genuine and shocking hospitality of Christ. Our invitations to others are not desperate attempts to gain social superiority or hidden requests to be invited back in return. Rather, they are rooted in the scandal of our own undeserving welcome, rooted in the redeeming and welcoming blood of the Lamb.
At Christ’s table there is a place for all, even the sinners and tax collectors, even the people you don’t like, even you.
The practice of hospitality is not a sentimental or naïve cliché, as so many perceive it today, but a courageous recognition of the vast brokenness around us. It is the stepping into and healing of this brokenness through the meeting of tangible needs. It is the antidote to the unfortunate tendency for Christians to feel burdened for the souls of our neighbors and forget that they are first men who must eat, pay rent, raise children, and grieve lost family members. Hospitality is not a shallow once-and-a-while act, but a foundational and life-long practice. True Biblical hospitality honors the people around us as worthy of our time, resources, and inconvenience regardless as their station or status in society. For biblical hospitality sees all humans as valuable gifts, as images of God–the imago dei.
For the Christian, the Eucharist is the greatest manifestation of hospitality in our current time and respective places. For it is both a physical meal eaten alongside fellow pilgrims, and a divine communion with a holy God. We come to the eucharistic table over and over again so that our weak and apathetic hearts might be filled by the presence of our Savior—“that we might dwell in Him and He in us” (Book of Common Prayer). Before kneeling beside our neighbor at the altar table, we welcome them with the passing of the peace. In this we see that the hospitality of God to us in the Eucharist is inseparable from the hospitality due our neighbor. For at Christ’s table there is a place for all, even the sinners and tax collectors, even the people you don’t like, even you. In the Eucharist we learn to be people of radical hospitality and welcome.
Thus, let us embrace the potential discomfort of extending invitations freely and joyously to those far different from us. And as our bodies are offered up as living sacrifices to the Holy God, let our tables be offered as the answer to humanity’s longing cry in the voice of the Israelites: “Can God spread a table in the wilderness?” (Psalm 78:19). Let our hospitality display the miraculous and resounding “yes” for which we are so desperate. Until the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, let us feast at tables in the wilderness.
Biblical hospitality sees all humans as valuable gifts, as images of God–the imago dei.
