If a hospital is where you go when you need looking after, a place of healing and care, then I suppose I can see where the word hospitality comes from, semantically speaking. I came across the picture of the three angels by Marc Chagall again yesterday while looking for something else. This Old Testament story of Abraham and Sarah is at once comical and mystical, poignant and puzzling. But the basic theme and the obvious point of the story is the refusal in Abraham's time to refuse welcome, food and refreshment. Entertaining angels unawares might be a miraculous by product – but the first obligation is welcome, provision and the courtesies of care. Even angels need a place to feel safe and be cared for in the desert.
Ever since I read his Reith lectures, The Persistence of Faith, I have read, admired and learned much from the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. He has recently written a commentary on Genesis in which he suggests that the human being is invested with such dignity and value by God, that to welcome and care for another person is more important than obligations of prayer and personal devotion. The suggestion that God will understand our missing prayers while we serve others is a profoundly counter-intuitive move in the exegesis of this passage. But something similar is happening in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The passers by were either watching out for themselves, or focused on doing their religious duty to God. Both were wrong.
Of course hospitality can take unexpected turns. So the announcement of a baby for the octogenarian Sarah is one of those great literary moments of poignant comedy. Sarah laughed. Now mocking the words of a guest is a serious breach of the courtesies of hospitality. But be fair. It did sound far fetched. And so this story lies at the pivotal moment of Jewish history when the promise to Abraham would be fulfilled and would depend on welcome given, food provided, and the courtesy of care to unknown guests.
I am left wondering about the way we live our lives, and whether we live with a responsibility to those who touch our lives, and whether friendship and welcome, trust and provision, care and courtesy, can survive the legitimation of selfishness that lies at the heart of the discourse of recession. Used often enough, and with the persuasive authority of media reported discourse, words like hard choices, severe cuts, reduced costs of welfare provision, are normalised, and the unthinkable becomes thinkable because it is reiterated till we inwardly accede to its inevitability. But not so. Not if this story still has currency as human wisdom and divine revelation.
The care for each other, the looking out for the vulnerable, the necessary championing of compassion as the default response of a civilised society, would be one way of practising hospitality as a social virtue and even as a political value. Wonder if the church of Jesus might have a think about what it might mean to embody welcome, inclusion, the courtesy of care, and like hospitals be places where healing and being looked after are more important than anything else. Back to this word missional again – still don't like it. I think to embody the hospitality of God, to entertain others and discover angels, might make us think again about what is possible for God. Sarah laughed – I don't blame her. Sometimes angels say ludicrous things – like at the Annunciation to Mary, and Jesus birth to shepherds - and at an empty tomb to another Mary. And isn't it interesting that some of the most moving post resurrection stories are about hospitality – Jesus cooking breakfast, and breaking bread before bed time…..