Hospitality: The Risk of Loving
Genesis 18:1-10a; Colossians 1:24-28; Luke 10:38-42
The world in which Abraham and Martha lived must be very different from ours! Three strangers walking together and Abraham runs to them and invites them to come and eat in his house: who does that today? Instead, we teach our children to call the police! According to the gospel of today, Jesus enters a village and a woman, Martha, welcomes him to her home: really, a stranger in a village who gets free lunch – is Martha running a restaurant because restaurant owners are those who seek out customers? Besides the outmoded behaviors of Abraham and Martha, there is the theological scandal of the second reading: “in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ” (Colossians 1:24). Is Jesus’ suffering and the salvation he obtained for us deficient, what does Paul mean?
The presuppositions of Abraham’s and Martha’s hospitalities are characteristics of a violence free and trusting neighborhoods. The morbid fear of today’s extremist and homophobic groups, kidnappers and sex-predators makes anyone behaving like Abraham and Martha look naive. Perhaps the very first challenge of our readings today is how to transform our society from a savage jungle into a home, where love and peace overflow. First, how could Abraham and Martha have done it and we seem not to be able to do it or how did we lose it – being neighbors to one another?
If at all a stranger gets help today, ours is a restaurant culture. Thanks to the many restaurants in our neighborhoods, it is very easy to welcome a visitor in one of them. The size of one’s pocket, not to say the cash value of one’s ATM/credit card, determines the choice of a restaurant. Yes, we take our guests far away from our comfort zones and problems – modern hospitality – because they are potential problems themselves: they may compromise our security or gossip about the state of our home, our family, our jobs, and the list is endless. Just pick up the restaurant bill, end of the story, and we have our peace. But what if they are the solution to our problems, those visitors? This is the part of the story we neglect, which people of old kept in mind!
Imagine the sun and heat of the desert that forced Abraham to sit outside his tent desperately praying for a cool breeze against the “canicular” rays of the sun! Abraham was NOT oblivious of another kind of heat within his home that is not caused by the heat of the sun, but caused by the desperation of an unanswered prayer or a delayed fulfillment of a promise – Abraham’s and Sarah’s barrenness. Meanwhile, Abraham notices three men traveling despite the heat weave of the day. He invites them to his home, away from the heat of the sun, to nourish them; it was then that the travelers brought, into Abraham’s home, a family heat-expeller – a promise of a child, so that staying home becomes comfortable and cause of joy and laughter for Abraham and Sarah.
The story of our first reading proves that bringing a visitor home or seeking out a guest for a treat in one’s home also has its advantages beyond being a source of insecurity; the visitor may turn out to be a home cleaner or a family organizer or marriage fixer; for Abraham, it was worth taking a chance. For instance, the messiness of Abraham’s house gets reordered, after receiving guests in his home – the gift of a child. This is because Abraham accepts to step out of the heat of his home, to seek the cool breeze outside, and he brings back the breeze into the company of his wife and servants in the form of three guests; then, he gets the promise that his home will be air-conditioned, the absence of a baby that heated up their home gets a date for it to be fixed: “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah will then have a son” (Genesis 18:10a).
There are many heat-weave triggers around us, and we desperately seek ways of keeping them in check. We have family feuds that make home-coming and home-going uninteresting. We have job-site trouble-makers or colleagues that make working a daymare, worst than a nightmare! There are partners or spouses that make marriages a living hell, and children that drive one naughts! Not least, our economic strangulations make generosity a rare commodity in human enterprise. All these compete for solutions. The ingredients for building a home is bringing in a visitor, inviting God into our homes in the form of the strangers and visitors in whose images God disguises himself to visit us. When we are cheap, we miss the opportunity to play host to God. Today, dollar-sign or pecuniary consciousness distances us from helping a visitor/stranger.
Swimming against the current is definitely tough, but doing that toughens us into changing the current culture of homophobia and create a neighborhood where there are no strangers but brothers and sisters. Indeed, hospitality is a risk that only those who truly love can take! We need to realize that the fact of being a stranger is all that is required to be made welcome in a home – that is the message of Martha in the gospel. The sight of a stranger or anyone suffering becomes the catalyst to activate the hospitality in the human person – this is the legacy of Abraham, in the first reading. The stranger transformed into a family member by hospitality is one person less in the arsenal of radical extremism and homophobia: you end a ghetto by emptying it of its inmates!
Abraham welcomed strangers at a cost – food, time and energy were expended. Martha welcomed Jesus at the price of free-cooking-labor, and Mary’s precious time sitting on the floor like a baby at Jesus’ feet. Martha wouldn’t be bogged down by anxiety should she have closed the doors of her home to Jesus. Indeed, Paul is right in his statement of the second reading that “in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ”. Paul is right because Jesus perpetuates his salvation through human acts of kindness and hospitality. Jesus needs you and me to walk up to our doors and open them for strangers to come in, then his salvation reaches those individuals we bring in from the cold and heat of our society. The money we spend settling in a stranger is not a waste but an investment that empties our society of social deviants and outlaws. The smile we help people to wear brings back their humanity and reveals Christ to them. Every good act comes at a price, but Jesus needs you and me to keep paying that price so as to keep up the work of salvation even today.
Assignment for the Week:
Could you offer solace to anyone in need this week?