Abstract
Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers for thereby some have entertained angels unawares (Hebrews 13.2).
Different country—different customs. Ghana—housebuilding. Not only a teacher of mathematics—but a labourer. Easy when you know how!
It was mud brick. I was mixing the mortar. Bare feet, earth and water. A wooden frame. Nicely shaped bricks. A baking sun. Easy when you know how!
Bare feet, earth and water. It reminded me of the annual blanket wash in our West Highland village. Bare feet treading the blankets in the huge kitchen sink. Easy when you know how!
All day long, I laboured with my friend, a student at the school who was the same age as I! As the day past, I noticed I wasn’t the only one. Something strange was going on in this housebuilding.
A man passed. He was on the way to market. A woman passed. She was carrying a baby on her back. Another passed and another and another and the strange thing was that none of them was too busy to stop.
This was housebuilding—and they wanted to help. One carried a brick or two to the building-site. Another moulded the brick. Another treaded the mortar with his bare feet and then they each continued their journey.
I was surprised. Why did they stop? Were they friends of the family? Not really. But they belonged to the same community. This was housebuilding and everyone played a part in it!
For when the house was built, everyone who helped to build it was entitled to share its hospitality. Housebuilding was a means of building community and extending its hospitality to include everyone.
Thinking about this experience forty-five years later, I can see it is a challenge to the conventions which surround Western hospitality. There is the host and there is the guest. The two are different.
The one exercises power. ‘Come and eat!’ and with the invitation there is the provision of a generous table. The guest is indebted. The debt is usually fulfilled in a note of thanks—and sometimes a reciprocal invitation.
Instead of this see-saw between host and guest, what happened to me in Ghana diffuses the border between a host and a guest and makes it more difficult to live in this binary world.
It is not only the host who exercises power but the guest is empowered by virtue of the housebuilding. In this world, the guest has a right to be there by virtue of sharing in the building of the house!
This makes for a more equitable community where it isn’t so easy to separate the givers from the receivers for everyone in this scenario is both a giver and a receiver!
In our reading from St. Luke’s Gospel, Jesus says some interesting things about guests. In the first place, he turns the see-sawing of host and guest upside down.
People are encouraged not to invite family and friends ‘in case they may invite you in return and you would be repaid’. Instead, we are called to invite ‘the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind’.
In the second place, guests are counselled not to come to table with a mistaken view of their own importance. It is the generosity of the host which is being celebrated.
The criteria which the host uses to send out his invitations may bear no relation to our own. We should be glad of the opportunity but careful not to exceed the honour which the host bestows upon us.
In our reading from Hebrews, the writer invites us to think not about the guest so much as the host in a ministry of hospitality. At its heart, this is a ministry about making room for others. It is all about three distinctive things.
Firstly, embracing anonymity. We are instructed to, ‘Show hospitality to strangers.’ This includes people who are unknown to us and those whose strangeness is likely to inhibit our invitations.
These invitations challenge the quid pro quo of conventional dinner parties and challenge us to love other people as fellow brothers and sisters made in the image of God.
Jesus favours anonymity. ‘Don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.’ When host and guest embrace anonymity, we enjoy a level playing field and lose the simplistic distinction between host and guest.
Anonymity favours the gospel and the dying to self which is a constituent part. It helps us face our own mortality and the austerity of living in the light of God’s Word: Naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked shall I return there; the blessed be the name of the
Secondly, entertaining angels. The writer assures us that in entertaining strangers, some have entertained angels! It happened to Abraham and Sarah and the three visitors at the Oaks of Mamre.
They benefitted from Abraham’s generous hospitality—bread and cakes, milk, curds, freshly cooked meat. These strangers have been immortalised in Rublev’s famous icon as the Holy Trinity.
They are all depicted as angels, messengers of God, for they bring with them startling news. Sarah is going to have a baby. At seventy-five, Sarah sees the funny side! She laughs but quickly denies it!
The writer to the Hebrews believes that some people who entertain strangers, entertain messengers of God. Every encounter has the potential. Faith and a willingness to listen are our imperatives.
In listening to another, we forget self and die to self-centred concerns, creating space for another to enlighten with a sign, a Word, a revelation which may come from God.
Having put food in the eating place, drink in the drinking place and music in the listening place, the old Celtic Rune of Hospitality assures us of God’s blessing: He blessed us and our house, Our cattle and our dear ones. As the lark says in her song: Often, often, often, goes theChrist
In the stranger’s guise.
Thirdly,
But the interesting thing about this text is that the writer not only tells us it is some and not all who entertain angels in opening their hearts to the stranger but when it happens, they are unaware of it.
‘Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’ The New Testament often commends alertness. ‘Keep awake . . . for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.’
Here it confirms that there are some things for which we could never be aware—and that is the work of angels who minister to us through the strangers sitting at our table or the hand of God at work in our world in ways which we never see and certainly cannot predict.
The infinite God is beyond our reach. And his work is done in those areas characterised by strangeness, hiddenness, and a level of existence for which our antennae are not readily tuned. It remains our field of exploration.
It’s the land plotted and pieced together by faith, hope and love, a world which defies our attempts to contain the living God. As the poet, RS Thomas, wryly concedes in The Empty Church: They laid this stone trap for him, enticing him with candles, as though he would come like some huge moth out of the darkness to beat there.