Matthew
25:31-40
There’s
more to hospitality than handing someone a donut and a mug of hot chocolate,
although that’s certainly a good start.
It’s not really hospitality in the fullest sense unless you share
something of yourself along with it. It
may not take a lot of time; a bride and groom, for instance, try to get around
to everybody at their wedding and that means that in some cases it’s just going
to be a quick, “Uncle Mortimer! I’m so
glad you’re here!” and they truly mean that, (and Uncle Mortimer knows whether
or not they do), even that quick recognition can be enough. What matters really, after all, is that
recognition. It’s that human one-to-one
connection.
In
Jesus’ description of the Last Judgment, the people whom he commends are the
ones who give another person the help that they need, but in a way that pays
attention to them as a person, not just as the object of charity. Many of the good works that the Lord praises
can be done in either a personal or impersonal way. Feeding the hungry and housing the homeless
and providing clothes to the naked can all be done from a distance. In fact, that’s generally how we do
that. There are people who act on our
behalf or as our representatives to do things that we sometimes cannot do or
cannot do well, and God bless them! It
just isn’t possible to cook a meal at the shelter every night, at least not for
most of us. On the other hand, however,
when Jesus declares how on that day he will say to the righteous,
“I was a stranger and you welcomed me, … I was sick and you took care of me,
I was in prison and you visited me…” [Matthew
25:35-36]
those
are not jobs that can be delegated to anyone else. Those are acts of real caring that force
people actually to get to know one another.
To welcome a stranger isn’t only a matter of saying, “Hello.” It isn’t just asking a list of get-to-know-you questions. “What’s your name? Where are you from? Have you been here long?” It’s not a matter of making small-talk and being able to come up with conversation-starters like, “Did you know that there’s a web site called, ‘The Most Horrible English Words’? I was trying to figure out how to say, ‘Hepaticocholecystostenterostomy,’ and there it was!” Try that out. Either you’ll instantly bond with someone or they’ll avoid you forever. No, to welcome a stranger is to make someone feel at home, like they belong – even better, letting them know they already do belong.
Again,
it’s a gift that some people have. When
I spent a year doing chaplaincy in Lancaster, I had to figure out which church
I wanted to attend. There was one where
I had cousins and I went there first. I
got there before them, and nobody really took notice. That was fine with me that day, to tell the
truth. The week that had just finished
had been way too full and I just wanted a chance to pray quietly. When my cousins got there, I was glad to see
them, and they introduced me to some folks afterward, the same people who had
not even nodded before (which would have been enough) – and this is hard to
describe – but they spoke to me not as a visitor, a person in my own right, but
as an extension of my cousins whom they knew already. The welcome just wasn’t quite there. The next week I visited another church where
I knew no one, and people were not overly in-your-face with warmth but when
they said, “Good morning,” they looked me in the eye and it felt like they
meant it. I went back the next week and
the usher who handed me the bulletin pointed to where I had been the previous
Sunday and said, “We held your seat for you.”
That was genuine and made me feel less of a stranger, even though he
never asked me my name or offered his.
Again,
that business of caring for the sick that Jesus mentioned is a very personal
thing. You get to know somebody when
they are not well, when they are incapable of being anybody but themselves. They get to know the caregiver under those
circumstances, too. You don’t hold a
basin for someone who’s sick to her stomach without showing that your care is
real. That same year I was talking
about, I was in a hospital room with a patient who had a family member sitting
there who told me he didn’t want to leave her side, but was incredibly scared
of even watching the nurse insert a line to draw blood. The next thing you know, there was the nurse,
holding an IV needle. The man insisted
on staying, and turned his head, but no sooner had the nurse started to push
the point into the vein than I saw his face go pale and he started to lean
forward and pass out. It was a foolish
way to make his point, but it was clear he cared so much about the patient that
he risked one of his big fears. That’s
hospitality. It’s a weird way to show
it, but it was the real deal.
The
same is true of visiting someone in prison.
You don’t do that easily. It
isn’t just the bureaucratic part of getting onto the visitors’ list or the
procedural part of leaving your personal belongings in a locker and going
through a metal detector or sometimes being patted down. It’s what happens after that. When you visit someone in prison, you are
locked in there with the prisoners. To
reach a visiting room, gates and doors will close behind you and it isn’t a
good thing to think about that too much but it isn’t a good idea to forget it,
either. You cannot visit someone in
prison without, on some level, your mere presence telling them that you take
them seriously as a human being. That’s in our day and in our country. In Jesus’ place and time it was much more of
a message, because the prisons were basically cellars with bars on them. Maybe there would be light, but probably not,
and you might need to bribe someone to get in and bribe someone else to get out
again safely. You only went if you saw
it as very, very important.
Hospitality
takes guts. You don’t know whom you may
meet when you meet the stranger. You
don’t know what you might catch when you care for the sick. You enter a whole world that nobody should be
a part of when you visit a prisoner.
Moreover, if you do take on the parts that sound safer, the feeding and
housing and clothing parts, and do so in a personal way, you may be exposed to
a lot of human pain and tragedy that tests your faith in people and perhaps even
in God.
Having
said all of that, I remind you that being hospitable is a spiritual gift, and
if you have it in even a small degree, and strengthen it (like any other gift)
by exercising it – maybe taking a small step or two first – it grows. Having said all of that, I remind you, too,
that it is a gift not only to the person on the receiving end but also to the
one who reaches out.
Kathleen
Norris is a writer who shares her own story about that. “Not long ago,” she writes,
“I had been running errands downtown, feeling
stressed out. My husband was suffering
one of his periodic depressions, which in turn had depressed me. And a number of petty difficulties and duties
were distracting me from my writing, which had not been going well to begin
with. I heard a voice call my name,
turned, and to my great surprise saw an acquaintance, a freelance writer who
had once collaborated with me on an article.
I had not seen him for over a year, but he felt like an old friend… This
in itself surprised me; a few hours before I would not have thought that I
would be glad to see anyone.”
She invited him back to the house, where he sat down
to dinner with her husband and her, then they all spent the evening
talking. He shared his struggles over
the previous year, during which his wife had died, and after he left Norris and
her husband (despite their own troubles) realized how fortunate they were to
have one another. She says,
“I was relieved to discover that hospitality was
still possible for us, as debilitated as we had lately seemed to be. I read somewhere, in an article on monastic
spirituality, that only people who are basically at home, and at home in
themselves, can offer hospitality. We
had both been so inward lately as to lose sight of that. But hospitality has a way of breaking through
the defenses of insularity. Our friend
had told us, as he said goodnight, that he felt refreshed for his long drive
through Montana the next day. We were refreshed
as well, the grace of hospitality having given all three of us much more than
we had any reason to expect.” [1]
It
makes me think of the verse from the letter to the Hebrews [13:2] that says,
“Do
not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have
entertained angels without knowing it.”
Jesus,
of course, as he so often does, takes it a step further and says that it may
not be merely an angel.
“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of
these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” [Matthew 25:40]
[1]
Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A
Vocabulary of Faith (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998), 266-267.
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