I. Brothers and Strangers

The Apostle John commends Gaius for a very specific act. Gaius has opened his home to traveling teachers, people he has never met, and John calls this “a faithful deed” (3 Jn 1:5), something that belongs to the very structure of belief.

The language John uses is deliberately paradoxical. He calls these itinerant missionaries adelphoi, “brothers,” yet he simultaneously calls them xenoi, “strangers.” Both designations are true at the same time, and the entire logic of the passage depends on holding them together. The adelphos belongs to the family of God; the xenos has no home of his own in the place where he arrives. These men are both members of the household of God and yet without a house. They “went forth for his name’s sake, taking nothing from the Gentiles” (1:7). As Peter Leithart observes in The Epistles of John Through New Eyes, John calls the outsiders “Gentiles” because the church is the community of the true Israel. The lines of mankind have been redrawn, yet boundaries remain. The missionaries refuse to rely on those outside the covenant. They travel from city to city carrying nothing but the Name of Jesus. In Jordan’s priestly typology (The Law of the Covenant), they are new-covenant Levites, voluntarily landless and set apart for service.

When Gaius opens his door, he becomes “a fellow worker for the truth” (1:8). He does not preach or travel, but opens his home and sets his table, and in doing so participates in the mission of the gospel no less fully than those who carry it. In the logic of Matthew 25, receiving a brother of Jesus is receiving Christ himself.

But there is also Diotrephes. John tells us that Diotrephes “does not receive the brethren, and forbids those who wish to, putting them out of the church” (1:10). Leithart notes that the letter’s chiastic structure places Diotrephes at the center of the book, and his real problem is not inhospitality as such but philoproteúōn, his lust to be first. He refuses the missionaries because they represent the apostles, whose authority he rejects. His closed door is a symptom of pride. Diotrephes does not merely fail to show hospitality but actively uses the closed door as a political instrument. He refuses the missionaries, forbids others from receiving them, and excommunicates those who disobey. In this case, inhospitality is not passive neglect but a lever for consolidating power. That is weaponized inhospitality.

The contrast between Gaius and Diotrephes is not a matter of temperament. It is a contrast between faithfulness and apostasy. To understand why John frames it so starkly, we must look further back.

II. The Door at Mamre

In Genesis 18, Abraham sees three strangers approaching and runs to meet them. He bows, offers water, prepares a meal, and stands while they eat. The strangers turn out to be Yahweh and two angels bearing the promise of Isaac. In the next chapter, two of those same visitors arrive at Sodom. Lot takes them in, but the city dwellers surround the house, demanding that the guests be handed over. Fire falls from heaven.

The juxtaposition is undeniable. At Mamre, the door opens, and life and promise enter. At Sodom, the door is besieged, and judgment falls. The letter to the Hebrews has exactly this scene in mind when it exhorts, “Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some have unwittingly entertained angels” (13:2). Already in Genesis, the architecture of social life before God is visible: gates, thresholds, doors, and tables that either admit or exclude. These structures are sacramental and political, places where God’s judgment is revealed. Biblical hospitality is not merely kindness. It is a public, liturgical act in which a community declares who belongs under its protection (see Leithart, Delivered from the Elements of the World).

When Diotrephes closes his door to the traveling missionaries, he is replaying the sin of Sodom. Sodom does not merely neglect the strangers at the gate; it mobilizes against them. Diotrephes does the ecclesiastical equivalent: he turns the table-fellowship of the church into an enforcement mechanism. Yet this does not mean that biblical hospitality is indiscriminate. In 2 John, the same apostle instructs the “chosen Lady” not to receive false teachers into the house of the church (2 Jn 1:10). As Leithart puts it, “love is not absolute toleration, unconditional welcome, boundary-less hospitality.” The true brother is to be received; the false teacher is to be excluded. Philoxenia is a covenantal act of recognition, not a sentimental policy of open borders.

III. Philoxenia

The New Testament commandments regarding hospitality are more pervasive than commonly recognized. Paul instructs the Romans to be “given to hospitality” (12:13). The qualifications for elders in 1 Timothy 3:2 and Titus 1:8 include the requirement that they be “hospitable”—philoxenos, a lover of strangers. Peter exhorts, “Be hospitable to one another without grumbling” (1 Pet 4:9). The Greek word is philoxenia—the love of the xenos. It is the precise opposite of xenophobia, and it is not an optional virtue for the warm-hearted. It is a structural requirement of the Christian community, a qualification for leadership, and a mark of the faithful church.

But where does this obligation come from? It is often treated as a Greco-Roman social convention that the early Christians baptized. This is backwards. Philoxenia is not a Greek invention dressed in Christian clothing. It is the mature fruit of a very old Israelite tree, rooted in the Mosaic law regarding the sojourner.

IV. The Resident Alien

The Hebrew word ger is usually translated as “stranger” or “sojourner,” but the most precise modern equivalent is “resident alien,” someone who lives within a community long enough to have a recognized status yet without the full rights of a native citizen. We tend to imagine a hostile or indifferent outsider; the biblical ger is different.​

In The Law of the Covenant, James B. Jordan describes the ger as a “pious pagan,” a Gentile who has turned from idols to worship Yahweh, though he has not been circumcised into Abraham’s house. He belongs to Yahweh by virtue of the covenant with Noah and stands, as it were, in the outer court of Israel’s priestly life—close enough to worship, not yet inside the household. Jethro, Rahab, and Naaman are figures of this kind.​

Because the resident alien truly belongs to Yahweh, God places him under the protection of his Law: “One law shall be for the native-born and for the stranger who dwells among you” (Ex 12:49). Israel must remember Egypt: “You know the heart of a stranger, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (23:9). The people who lived on borrowed mercy must extend the same mercy to those who now live on their doorstep.​

The ger also has real, though limited, access to worship. He may bring vow offerings, freewill offerings, and ascension offerings—the same sacrifices an Israelite brings (Num 15)—but he may not eat the Passover. He is, however, fully invited to the Feast of Tabernacles, Israel’s great harvest festival and preview of the nations gathered in.​

One restriction governs his whole existence: a resident alien cannot permanently own agricultural land. The land, divided among the tribes, is the “holy of holies” of the world-sanctuary, the inner inheritance of the priestly people. The ger lives at the threshold in the “gates”—the cities along the trade routes—with no field of his own, surviving because Israel opens its doors. When Israel is faithful, the ger flourishes; when Israel breaks the covenant, the ger is the first to suffer.​

Now the force of 3 John comes into focus. In the Old Testament, the movement is centripetal: the Queen of Sheba comes to Solomon, Naaman comes to Elisha. In 3 John, the movement is centrifugal: missionaries go out from the Church to the nations, “taking nothing from the Gentiles.” The direction has changed, but the covenantal principle has not. As the Old Testament ger depended on Israel because he had no land, so New Testament missionaries depend on local churches because they carry no worldly support. When Gaius opens his door, he keeps the ancient law regarding the ger in a new key.​

V. The Voice of the Sojourner

Proverbs 30 is attributed to a man named Agur. Patrick Skehan, in Studies in Israelite Poetry and Wisdom, suggests that the name may derive from the verb gûr, “to sojourn,” so that Agur means “I am a sojourner,” echoing Jacob’s words before Pharaoh, “The years of my sojournings are a hundred and thirty” (Gen 47:9). Whether or not the etymology is exact, the chapter presents Agur as the voice of the sojourner speaking wisdom. His first words set the tone, “Surely I am more stupid than any man, and do not have the understanding of a man” (Prov 30:2). Agur is a believer who knows he possesses nothing, not even his own understanding.​

The sociologist Georg Simmel noted that the stranger’s lack of local rootedness gives him a peculiar objectivity: Having no stake in the settled arrangements, he sees what the native misses. Agur displays the same pattern transposed into a theological key. His confession of ignorance is not false modesty but the epistemological posture of a man without property, a man whose wisdom is a gift he cannot control. And from this place of radical not-owning, he utters some of the sharpest observations in Proverbs. Simmel’s stranger brings objectivity; Agur brings humility. In both cases, the one who possesses nothing is the one who sees clearly.​ This is another reason to welcome sojourners.

These sojourners form a chain: Abraham leaving his land, Jacob in Egypt, the landless Levites, Agur the Sojourner, and the apostles who leave everything to follow Christ. The chain culminates in Jesus himself, who has nowhere to lay his head and, in his passion, becomes the rejected Stranger outside the gate.

Philoxenia is therefore not a New Testament innovation. It is a new form of an old covenantal obligation. The church in every city today is what the gates of Israel once were. On the Lord’s Day, the congregation gathers around the Lord’s Table—the fulfilled Passover and the firstfruits of the final Tabernacles feast. The former ger, now baptized, sits not at the edge but in the center, eating and drinking with the royal priesthood. The Eucharistic table is the engine of a new politics (Leithart, Theopolitan Liturgy). To open our doors to landless brothers is to undermine the reign of other lords who claim to decide who belongs and who does not.

When we support missionaries, fund the planting of churches in hostile places, welcome itinerant believers, or set an extra place at the table for a Christian who has no earthly security, we fulfill the law regarding the ger. And when a church closes its doors, withholds support, or turns inward upon itself, it does not merely neglect this law. It weaponizes inhospitality, as Diotrephes did, and places itself on the wrong side of the threshold that runs from Mamre to Sodom.

And in doing so, we confess something about ourselves. The posture of the sojourner—Agur’s posture, Jacob’s posture—is the posture of every believer in this age. We possess nothing permanently. We are resident aliens on earth, looking for the city whose builder and maker is God (Heb 11:10). An open door is not an act of mere charity but an act of recognition. In the wandering brother, we see our own condition, and behind his face, the face of the One who had nowhere to lay his head and who now spreads his table to the ends of the earth.

Bogumil Jarmulak received his PhD from Christian Theological Academy in Warsaw, Poland.