Hospitality to Whom?

“I assure you that everybody who gives even a cup of cold water to these little ones because they are my disciples will certainly be rewarded” (Matthew 10:42).

Jesus’ disciples are about to go on a mission of sharing the gospel message by casting out unclean spirits and curing every disease and sickness. Surely, such a tall order requires some serious provisions. But Jesus instructs them to go out with only the clothes on their back. The only thing they have to rely on is the kindness of strangers. Hospitality is their only provision.

No hospitality, no gospel message. Hospitality is crucial to the advancement of forgiveness and healing, justice and mercy, righteousness and hope. Well, if hospitality is so important, how do we practice it? Apparently, by offering a cup of cold water to little ones.

If that’s the case, then I saw the goodness of the gospel being shared a few weeks ago at a free book fair at Crockett Elementary School. Our church had donated nearly 2,000 books, so that each student, from Pre-K to 4th Grade, could take home six books to enjoy over the summer. They were not literal cups of cold water, but those books were life-giving offerings of hope for the little ones at Crockett, as well as for our adult volunteers helping them choose which six they would take home.

The “little ones” Jesus tells us to give a cup of cold water to are not just children, though. In his commentary on Matthew’s Gospel, Douglas Hare writes that “little ones” refers to “humble Christians who are not church leaders and who may also be poor. Such persons must not be neglected or treated with disdain, because they too represent the Christ.”

Now, before we trip ourselves up by limiting “these little ones” to being only Christians, let’s fast forward to chapter 25 of Matthew’s gospel where Jesus talks about our requirement to help everyone. Now Jesus says that extending kindness to any human being, welcoming any member of what the poet Maya Angelou beautifully terms “the human family,” especially those who are among our society’s most vulnerable outcasts, is to welcome Jesus, and thereby to welcome the Divine. When Jesus liberates us from distinguishing between who is deserving in our judgment and who is not, we can freely offer more and more of those simple acts of kindness to all of God’s little ones.

Hospitality sets us free to offer a cup of cold water to someone who might be in a situation completely foreign to our experience; someone in a world that is outside our limited understanding. And when we are brought into relationship with one another by the bond that hospitality creates, there is no more host and guest, no more insider and outsider, there is only a space in which we listen to and learn from one another, value and honor one another until all the uneven ground on which we stand becomes level, and the rough places are made a plain.

I believe hospitality is crucial to the gospel message because unless we change our perspectives, unless we change the state of our hearts and minds about the strangers that our society beats down into vulnerable exhaustion, unless we are able to see others not as “other” but as beloved, then we cannot be about the mission of sharing the good news of forgiveness and healing, of justice and mercy, of righteousness and hope.

Jesus says that when we welcome the least of these who are members of his family, we welcome him. And in the book Making Room, Pamela Buck and Christine Pohl write that “the most vulnerable strangers are those people who are disconnected from relationships with family, church, economy, and civic community.” Well, if the least of these in God’s family are cut off from worldly family, from church, from economy and civic community, to whom in our society is Jesus telling us to offer hospitality? Who is Jesus telling us to listen to and learn from so that the gospel message would be advanced and God’s kingdom would grow?

Maybe practicing hospitality would usher us into a mutual space where all of us little ones realize that each of us is loved equally by God, and that each of us is crucial to God’s kingdom of forgiveness and healing, justice and mercy, righteousness and hope on earth as it is in heaven.

Prayer: God of abundant hospitality, Jesus tells us that in Your house there are many mansions, a place for all of Your children. So, may our lives become a spacious sanctuary where all who enter it would find peace, rest, and adventure, and be blessed of Your love for having been welcomed there. As we have been the recipients of Your living water in Christ Jesus to the point of our cup overflowing, move us from hostility to hospitality so that we would have all we need to carry out Jesus’ instructions of offering a cold cup of water to any of Your children. It’s for the sake of the gospel message and Your kingdom of many blessings that we pray. Amen.