For us, hospitality usually means entertaining. It means having our friends and neighbors and church members into the home. Sometimes, in our world, it involves jockeying for position and power by showing hospitality to the right kinds of people. That’s how the rich and famous create and sustain the aura of being rich and famous – by making sure other rich and famous people are around all the time.
It’s a good thing, of course, to have friends and neighbors into our homes. But Jesus warns us about using hospitality as a tool of power. He warns us not to invite people to our homes in hopes of a payback, whether that’s an invitation to their homes or some kind or prestige or power. He tells us instead to invite people who can’t return the same to us.
But in the early church, hospitality was something much more demanding, more radical, more truly a self-sacrificial Christlike ministry.
Hospitality should involve not only entertaining people in the home, but giving travelers a place to stay, helping others through difficult financial and family crises, and providing for others’ needs.
As Christine Pohl points out in Making Room , Julian the Apostate, the Roman Emperor who tried to reverse Constantine’s Christianization of the Empire, complained about the “atheism” of Christians, and said that this atheism was spreading because of the church’s “benevolence to strangers,” among other things. He went on, “it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galileans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.”
The church set up various institutional forms of hospitality, including hospitals for the rejected and marginalized sick and weak. But the early church fathers also said that individual believers were supposed to show the same hospitality. Christine Pohl writes of Chrysostom: “Even if the needy person could be fed from common funds, Chrysostom asked, ‘Can that benefit you? If another man prays, does it follow that you are not bound to pray?’ He urged his parishioners to make a guest chamber in their own houses, a place set apart for Christ – a place within which to welcome ‘the maimed, the beggars, and the homeless.’”
Chrysostom’s church in Antioch, Pohl says, “cared for three thousand widows and virgins gaily, and, in addition, cared for those in prison, sick, and disabled, and those away from their homes. The church also provided food and clothing for those who came ‘casually’ everyday. From 400 to 403, Chrysostom built a number of hospitals in Constantinople. These provided care for strangers and orphans, as well as for those who were sick, chronic invalids, old, poor and destitute.”
In an era before Holiday Inn and Motel 6, travelers were often dependent on the hospitality of locals, and when inns started to take over this function and turn it into a money-making proposition in the 16th century, Calvin saw it as a sign of human depravity.