Mass readings for the 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Genesis 18.1-10a Psalm 15.1b-5 Colossians 1.24-28 Luke 10.38-42
Today’s scriptures prompt us to think about hospitality – it’s purpose. As much as we are accustomed to being hospitable, we don’t offer hospitality for its own sake. Many would agree that hospitality contributes to civility – that is, coexistence in a given space with a diverse group of people. To speak of civility and civilization is to be talking about towns and cities where large populations are gathered, and that always poses a challenge for integrating a large group of people into a true community. Hospitality is the stuff of community, and from community civilizations grow.
Yet in the gospel, Jesus makes it clear that it’s more than that; it’s more than something that smooths over relations among people. It opens a space and a time for God. At the dinner table, gathered around the campfire, reposing on cushions in a tent, for those who understand the aim of hospitality, it allows God to speak, for God to be present, for God to manifest his grace in moments of suspicion and distrust, and to confer blessings among those gathered in his name.
Martha’s mistake is often taken to be in her failure to relax, sit down and listen to our Lord (and there’s truth in that). This is what her sister Mary is doing. The conflict is often posed in terms of Martha doing all the work, and Mary none. I don’t think that is likely. It’s fair to imagine that both women worked to welcome Jesus and make him comfortable. What Jesus is trying to correct in Martha is her placing of an absolute value and priority on hospitality, and we see her doing this when she upbraids her sister.
For Martha, being a product of her culture, the offer of hospitality is not simply in the giving of it, but also in being seen to give it. Demonstrative hospitality is a matter of honour in most cultures ancient and contemporary. If I invite you into my home, for example, and I offer you a drink, to properly honour you, I will go get it and serve it to you. I won’t say to you, “there’s the fridge, get what you want.” Now, were you to be at my home all the time, becoming in some sense one of the household, that offer to grab what you want from the fridge doesn’t imply a lack of regard for you. Rather, it signals trust and comfort with you in my private space. But that’s not the situation. Mary is comfortable in sitting at Jesus’ feet when there is potentially so much more to do that shows, in Martha’s mind, real devotion to the Lord. However, it’s Martha who is wrong – Christ is honoured far more in that we pay attention to him, learn from him, recognize his authority to teach us. That is true devotion. To run around in a display of activity centred on him while failing to attend to what he has to say to us, that’s grave error. Mary has the better part of this encounter because, not only does she truly honour Christ, she has the benefit of learning from him. Martha really only has her sense of personal satisfaction in having done what her culture, her society expects of her as a good hostess.
Yet, this does not mean we dispense with hospitality, but understand its purpose, what it is meant to accomplish in the way of making time for God.
For humanity, its most ancient law is probably the law of hospitality. Hospitality in our earliest days, long before we had anything approaching a civilization was a necessary tactic when encountering others. When as nomadic people, on the move, two camps of hunting and gathering humans encountered each other in their seasonal movements, they would have to work out a means of dispelling suspicions and lessening tensions. If one wanted your group to survive, fighting with everyone encountered in your wanderings was not a good strategy. One definitely preferred peace, and the making of friends. And when we consider what that’s about, the sharing in kindness with others, in peace where one relaxes in the presence of others not members of your family or tribe, or nation, God is in that, his Spirit dwells there – it is something of the peace of God. And people long before the time of Abraham discerned that fact. Indeed, it is a commonplace in ancient cultures to have as essential wisdom that one should always be kind and hospitable to strangers because one might be entertaining gods in disguise.
When we read and hear stories of Jesus’ great enemy, the Pharisees, inviting him to dinner, remember these Pharisees are conforming themselves to the conventions of their society as much as they are following the Law of Moses. Some are open to the possibility that, perhaps this fellow from Nazareth is a prophet of God, or even something more. While for others, they are looking to trap him.
Now, what is essential to us in our exercise of hospitality is that its aim is to open that space for God. Hospitality that does not aim at this is sinful. If we offer hospitality as part of a strategy of seduction, as a means of currying favour, as a bribe; if it’s offered under conditions – you know, we’ll feed you but you have to convert to Catholicism – well, that’s not hospitality properly speaking. Equally, to offer hospitality to those who abuse our generosity, who take the opportunity to insult and abuse us, then the hospitality, like blessings refused by those who rejected Christ’s apostles, the grace of it will return to us. However, we are not obligated to continue its offer. If either those who offer hospitality or those who receive it do so unworthily, then God cannot enter there, and instead, a place is made for the diabolical. And so, we see instances around the world today where hospitality is abused by those who receive it, but then, it is often offered from unworthy motives. As populations on the move around the globe bump more and more into each other, we are witnessing great evils from the ostensible hosts, but also the ungrateful and demanding guests.
And with respect to that, it’s been instructive to see that next to conflicts arising from migration into Europe from Africa and the Middle East, Britain from South Asia, America from the lands to her south, there have also been angry demonstrations against Americans and Europeans moving into places like Mexico City, and Athens, Greece that have made life for locals unaffordable, and seen their local cultures “globalized” so that North Americans searching for a better life can have their Starbucks coffee.
As Christ is less and less part of the civilizational conversation, the discussion of where we are headed, and what we should be doing, how little surprising that the civilization itself is falling apart. We can’t find the answers, because we won’t do the listening. We can’t be hospitable to people if we’ve forgotten why; and we can’t receive as guests those who refuse our hospitality in the spirit it is given. And running around like Martha, in a display of hospitality, generosity, kindliness and community avails us nothing, and is instead a missed opportunity to share in the better part. We should listen to our Lord, and recognize that ultimately, he is our host; and his hospitality is evident in the world he has made for us, in the life that Christ gave for us, in the Eucharist he gives to sustain us.
Amen.