A few years ago, I attended a conference on Christian hospitality and was shocked by things that, in retrospect, shouldn’t have surprised me.
Being a male, I was part of a tiny minority at the conference. The lectures were full of good advice—practical, theoretical, and theological—but it was mostly limited to the domestic sphere.
How clean does the house need to be? How can we use the material arrangements of the house to communicate welcome? How far should you stretch yourself toward hospitality amid a busy life? What is the optimal mix of strangers and friends at a gathering? How do you get the word out if you want to host more? What do you do with interpersonal tensions at a meeting? These are essential questions, and you won’t hear me slight or minimize them.
[By the way, pick up Christine Pohl’s wonderful book Making Room if those important questions are also your questions. It tackles those and more and is a great jumping-off point for further exploration into Christian hospitality.]
However, I did have the terrible sense that all the answers offered that weekend had taken as a starting point too much of the consensus of modern Western individualism and materialism in which we all live and move and have our being. Into this strangely isolated, atomized, privatized, secularized, commodified condition, hospitality was offered as another religious pastime, a good deed in a list of characteristics of the pious life.
Somehow, hospitality has been reduced to entertaining, but it should be so much more than that.
The Way Things Look Is Still Important
This isn’t to say candles and flowers on the table aren’t important. They are.
When people come into our spaces, they should feel welcome. That welcome is communicated in a hundred different ways that show that their needs, interests, personalities, and personhood have been taken into account.
That means you clean (if you can). You offer tea and coffee. You make eye contact and ask people questions. You listen. You observe. You react to what you notice. You do all the “kindergarten skills” that tell people, “You have my attention and my interest and I want you to be comfortable.”
The word should be filled with large and grand meanings that go back to the very nature of what it means to be a human in God’s reality. The pursuit of hospitality must be a fundamental commitment for the Christian. Inside that commitment is a key that can unlock the shackles of materialistic assumptions that often keep the modern follower of Christ bound in a prison they can neither see nor feel.
Hospitality is the Most Basic Human Calling
The story of hospitality starts at the very beginning—in Genesis.
On the first page of the Bible, God calls humanity to “be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.” This doesn’t mean we are to dominate the earth or one another but to have dominion over creation like a good gardener, stewarding it toward fruitfulness. That is part of what it means to be made in the image of God, whose commitment to the people and things that he has made infinitely exceeds our own.
This calling stands over all places and all times that have been given to each person. What people feel, hear, and experience when they come into your places and step inside your time is an expression of this basic calling to embody the image of God.
From there, the theme of hospitality runs straight through the Bible to the last page, when God opens the doors to his holy city and never shuts them again.
Between Genesis and Revelation, the highest moments of the Bible’s heroes are marked by their welcome to strangers, enemies, the weak, and the afflicted. Throughout the story, God consistently welcomes his wayward people back, founding and re-founding a place where they can live in peace and promising a time when he will finally set aside the troubles plaguing his creation once and for all.
Jesus as the True Host
However, the clearest example of the high-water mark of biblical hospitality is the life of Jesus.
Some might say, “Wait. How could Jesus be hospitable? He didn’t have a home?” On one hand, I can sympathize with this objection. After all, though all things were created through Him, and for Him, Jesus was homeless. During the days of his ministry, the Son of Man had no place to lay his head.
On the other hand, that objection is another case of the hospitality-as-entertaining model rearing its head since almost all of Jesus’ interactions with people can be described in terms of hospitality. If one looks at Jesus’ life and doesn’t see hospitality reflected there, the problem isn’t with Jesus but with our notions of hospitality.
Yes, Jesus fed people extravagantly on several occasions, but his hospitality wasn’t limited to food, drink, and a smile. Rather, all God’s work to conform his people to his likeness can be seen as hospitality. As Ben Keyes said in his wonderful lecture, Image Bearers of a Hospitable God, “Holiness is something we are given when we receive the hospitality of God.”
Jesus’ stories were full of characters enacting hospitality as a way of life. Think of the hero of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, a story designed to challenge and shock his hearers into silent reflection on the misbegotten thinking they had accepted as normal. Think of the parable of the Lost Sheep. The good shepherd leaves the herd (who are comfortable and safe) and goes out wandering for the lost one (who needs extraordinary love) and brings it home. Think of the banquet host who wants his table to be full so deeply that he goes into the highways and the byways to bring everyone who will come. What does the father in the story of the Prodigal Son do when his wayward child comes home? He runs to his son, embraces, honors, and feasts with him. Think of the Unjust Steward. Or the Lost Coin. Or the Mustard Seed. Jesus’ stories are glimpses into the world he was trying to create.
Not only did his stories point toward the reality of profound hospitality, but his presence also did. Around Jesus, bodies were made whole, the thinking of his hearers was untwisted, the storming creation was calmed, demons fled, and even death obediently ran backward. To be near Jesus was to see the world being made new. It is as if his presence was a beachhead of the kingdom of God, and all his words and actions made that Other Kingdom radiate out from himself, pushing back the effects of the fall and making all sad things come untrue. Finally, the host had come and was putting the house in order.
At times, his hospitality even involved force. Mark tells us that, moments before he gave the rich young ruler a seemingly impossible task, “he looked at him and loved him.” Jesus knew the young man would walk away when faced with selling all his possessions. That is why he said it. Jesus put the man to a decision that cut all his self-aggrandizing daydreams of righteousness to ribbons.
It was a very welcoming thing to do. Christ’s love has steel in it.
Hospitality is Openness to the Intrusions of Love
Just as hospitality isn’t entertaining, it isn’t even always hosting.
Hospitality is the readiness to welcome the intrusions and interruptions that love demands. That kind of love is profligate with time. It gives away time as though it were a precious resource that one has in such abundance that it has become common.
There is even a sense that an open-handedness to interruptions is the enactment of openness to God himself. We all have plans for our moments, and our days and interruptions cut across them, altering those plans or sometimes scattering them across the floor like blocks from a tumbled tower. Some of those interruptions are important. Some of them are ordained by God. So, hospitality to interruptions can be seen as an opportunity to join the Lord in something unforeseen.
Those practicing such hospitality can learn to cultivate an attitude that says, “Lord, I do not know what you have for me today, but I am your creature. My time is not my own, and I want to be open to what you will show me.”
Those gifted in this aspect of love can offer those around them the sense that they are wholly present, that their conversation partners are utterly valued, and are the only object of their attention while their time together lasts.
Hospitality Isn’t an Optional Add-on for the Kingdom of God
Just as in the life of Jesus, hospitality happens wherever you happen to be.
It happens on the street, in the office, at stoplights, and at AA meetings. It isn’t limited to the walls of a house and a date on the calendar. You extend it to your kids at bedtime and to your spouse during a moment of clarity in the midst of a nasty fight. It happens when you barbecue in your front yard instead of your backyard so that you can say hello to people who walk by simply because that is what it means to be a city on a hill and salt to a needy world.
Because of this, hospitality isn’t an optional add-on for the kingdom of God. It isn’t just for those with a flare for cooking. You do not need a bigger house to do more of it. It isn’t women’s work. It isn’t a lifestyle accessory to take up when you have it all together. It isn’t an outreach program. It isn’t just a small piece of a pious Christian life. Hospitality is the yeast that permeates the whole.
So next time you read 1 Peter and come across the command to “show hospitality to one another without grumbling,” try to stretch your imagination of what that could look like beyond inviting your friends over for another get-together. Better yet, interpret it in light of the vast and boundless verse immediately preceding it: “Love one another earnestly, for love covers a multitude of sins.”