Christian Hospitality

In the Christian tradition hospitality reflects God’s hospitality to human beings. The Old Testament emphasis on hospitality to strangers is rooted in God’=s welcome to the Israelites when they were slaves in Egypt. In the New Testament hospitality is made more radical. It applies to our enemies as well. We are to walk the extra mile, to offer our suit when asked for our shirt, to treat our enemies as we would our friends.

This deepening of hospitality reflects a change of focus from the one who offers hospitality to the one who asks for it. In the Christmas story, God does not simply offer hospitality to us, but seeks hospitality from us. As the carols tell us, the Son of God comes as a baby needing shelter and food, totally dependent on others. In asking for hospitality, God enables us to accept it ourselves.

Jesus also reverses the usual pattern of hospitality when he sends out his disciples to preach the Gospel without money, spare clothing or food. They have no option but to seek hospitality from the people to whom they preach. Those who offer them hospitality will be more likely to listen favourably to God’s word.

To ask for hospitality from strangers, of course, leaves you naked before the calculating. They can ignore your need and use you to send signals to others. But that is also written into the Gospel story. One of the most poignant stories is of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem because the city did not offer hospitality to God’s word.

The practice of hospitality is central in the Christian tradition. The unity of the early church was cemented by a network of hospitality. Christian preachers travelled, were welcomed, shared their insights into the Gospel, and moved on. Later the churches became known for the welcome they gave to strangers and refugees who were repelled by civil institutions.

As the rulers of the Empire became Christian, monasteries became places of hospitality, churches places of sanctuary, and hospitals developed out of the guest-houses that sprouted along the pilgrim routes….

The nature of God can well be described as hospitality. The metaphor picks up the energy, mutuality and unity in diversity which any Christian understanding of God as Trinity must track. It also suggests how creation may be both a free and a natural expression of God’s nature, and that the world, and particularly human creation, images the hospitality of God.

The relationship between human destiny, human moral life, human sin and restoration is also illuminated by the metaphor of hospitality. The nature of hospitality is to respect the otherness of both guest and host. It leads naturally to acceptance of God’s invitation to enjoy God’s life. Sin, as the refusal of hospitality, both distorts personal and structural relationships within the world, and makes it impossible to accept God’s invitation.

Within this theology, it is natural to describe Jesus Christ as hospitality incarnate and, in Irenaean terms, as the natural climax of creation. In him, the Son of God journeys to a far country to seek and offer hospitality. In Jesus Christ God’s invitation is definitively offered to and accepted by humanity.

In Jesus Christ, too, hospitality is expressed in the political and personal relationships of a human life. The Lucan account of the woman at Simon’s house is emblematic. Here the woman who welcomes Jesus as guest, against all the practices which govern political and religious life, finds God as host. As will be the case definitively in the resurrection, the hospitality of God proves victorious over the logic and power of the structures of inhospitality.

The Church is the sacrament of hospitality firstly in the sense that it is the community of disciples who have found a hospitable God in Jesus Christ, and whom the Spirit leads to go out to find hospitality for the Word of God among the poor. Secondly, the Church rep- resents the world transformed by hospitality; she proclaims the transformed world, awaits it, and although in maimed ways, struggles to represent it in her own life.

Finally, the Church is gathered in the eucharist, the sacrament of Gods hospitality. There Christ is welcomed by the disciples who are invited to share God’s hospitality. Furthermore, the cost of hospitality is enacted in the memorial of the Last Supper and passion, in which the disciples of Christ commit themselves to follow the hospitality of Jesus.

Andrew Hamilton

The Will Of God

God does not directly send pain, suffering and disease. God does not punish us, at least not in this life. I hold this confidently because in 1 John 1:5 we are told that, ‘God is light, in him there is no darkness’ – so deadly and destructive things cannot be in the nature of and actions of God. Secondly, whatever we make of the varied images of God in the Old Testament, in Jesus God is revealed as being about life not death, construction not destruction, forgiveness not retribution, healing not pain. There is a huge difference between God permitting evil and God perpetrating such acts on us. We need to stare down those who promote and support a theology that portrays God as a tyrant.

God does not send accidents to teach us things, though we can learn from them. We do not need to blame God directly for causing our suffering in order for us to turn it around and harness it for good. The human search for meaning is a powerful instinct but I think spiritual sanity rests in seeing that in every moment of every day, God does what he did on Good Friday: not allowing evil, death and destruction to have the last word, but ennobling humanity with an extraordinary resilience and, through the power of amazing grace, enabling us to make the most of even the worst situations and let light and life have the last word. Easter Sunday is God’s response to Good Friday: life out of death.

God does not will earthquakes, floods, droughts or other natural disasters: can we stop praying for rain please? If God is directly in charge of the climate, he seems to be a very poor meteorologist indeed. When people ask, ‘why did the earthquake and tsunami happen?’, I think it best if we just tell them the simple geophysical truth: ‘Because the earth shelf moved, setting off a big wave.’ Behind the meteorologist-in-the-sky idea is not the God and Father of Jesus Christ, but Zeus, and I think we have to be careful what we think petitionary prayer does. It cannot change our unchanging God (James 1), so it asks our unchanging God to change us to change the world.

God’s will is more in the big picture than in the small. I believe passionately in the will of God. It is just that I believe it is discovered on the larger canvass rather than in the details. I think God wants me to live out the theological virtues of faith, hope and love (1 Corinthians 13). Through the blessing of time and place, the gifts of nature and grace, I work with God to realise my potential in the greatest way possible, even if that involves having to do things that are difficult, demanding and sacrificial. This response is not out of fear and compulsion, but comes from love and desire. I think we should be very careful in talking about God’s will using lines like, ‘But for the grace of God, go I’. What about the poor person who was not so blessed? Did God not care about them?

God did not need the blood of Jesus. Jesus did not just come ‘to die’ but God used his death to announce the end to death. This is the domain of ‘offer it up’ theology: it was good enough for Jesus to suffer; it is good enough for you. While I am aware of St Paul in Romans, St Clement of Alexandria, St Anselm of Canterbury and later John Calvin’s work on atonement theory and satisfaction theology, I cannot baldly accept that the perfect God of love set up for a fall in the Fall, then got so angry with us that only the grisly death of his perfect son was going to repair the breach between us. This is not the only way into the mystery of Holy Week. For most of Christian history the question that has vexed many believers seems to be, ‘Why did Jesus die?’ I think it is the wrong question. The right one is ‘Why was Jesus killed?’ And that puts the last days of Jesus’ suffering and death in an entirely new perspective. Jesus did not simply and only come to die. Rather, Jesus came to live. As a result of the courageous and radical way he lived his life, and the saving love he embodied for all humanity, he threatened the political, social and religious authorities of his day so much that they executed him. But God had the last word on Good Friday: Easter Sunday.

God has created a world which is less than perfect, else it would be heaven, and in which suffering, disease and pain are realities. Some of these we now create for ourselves and blame God. I have lost count of the number of people who have said to me, ‘I cannot believe in a God who allows famines to happen.’ I think God wonders why we let famine happen. God is responsible for allowing a world to evolve within which the effects of moral and physical evil can create injustices. But God is not responsible because we refuse to make the hard choices that would see our world transformed into a more just and equal place for everyone. In the face of this obstinacy, it is not surprising that we find a divine scapegoat to carry the guilt for our lack of political will and social solidarity.

God does not kill us off. As Catholics, thank God, at least since the 1960s, we do not officially take the scriptures literally until we go near texts about God knowing the ‘hairs on our head’ and the ‘span of our days’ (Jer 1:5; Gal 1:15-16; Prov 16:33; and Matt 10:30). Then we become completely fundamentalist. When I go near a nursing home I am regularly asked, ‘Father, why won’t God take Grandma? To which I reply ‘Because Grandma won’t stop breathing yet.’ I do not actually say this. I have more pastoral sense than that, but I want to. The verb ‘take’ is so revealing of what we think is going on here. Why would God’s desire ‘to take’ a two year old to heaven be more than God’s desire ‘to leave’ this child in the arms of loving parents? In contrast to this, I think it is entirely appropriate to believe that life, from the womb to the nursing home, is not allotted a span, as such, by God, but that our body will live until it can no longer function, for whatever natural or accidental reason. God is not an active player in this process, but, again, has to take responsibility for making us mortal. Then, when our body dies, our soul or spirit begins its final journey home.

Some might think that the theology outlined here presents God as remote or aloof. I do not need to think that God has to be the direct cause of everything in my life to have a strong and lively belief in a personal God. Indeed, I am passionate about God’s personal love and presence. Thinking that God is removed from the intricate detail of how things develop does not remove God from the drama of our living, our suffering and dying. God waits patiently for an invitation to enter our lives at whatever level we want. Christ meets us where we are, embraces us and holds us close when the going gets tough, and helps us find the way forward, even and most especially, on that last day when we find the way home.

Richard Leonard