This week’s gospel reading finds Jesus and his disciples on the road again. He is heading for Jerusalem for the last time. The roads on which he travels are not particularly friendly: When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; but they did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem.
What’s happening here? We need to know a little about the mix of religion and politics to make sense of it. Samaritans were also people of Israel – they were descendants of the Northern Kingdom in the days when North (Samaria) and South (Judea) were separate and ruled by different kings. One reason for the split was that when King David established Jerusalem as a capital, THE place where the Spirit of God had come to dwell, the leadership there sought to make Jerusalem – and the temple David’s son Solomon built – the ONLY holy place where sacrifices could be offered. All the holy places and shrines in Samaria, the northern part of Israel, were denigrated. This did not sit well with the residents and priestly class of Samaria. Gradually the feud became a schism between two branches of one family.
When Jesus’ advance team came into this Samaritan village to see if Jesus could stay there, they were rebuffed. Whatever the natural hospitality of the people might have been, they were not going to play host to any religious leader heading to Jerusalem. The wounds were still fresh this many centuries later.
This is so often the case when we disapprove of what someone else stands for. We might not even bother to get to know the person, rejecting her for her opinions or positions on issues. In our polarized times, some are allergic to even hearing views that they find abhorrent, calling them toxic. And sometimes those views really are abhorrent. When do we listen and when do we say, “Enough?”
Maybe a better question is: what is hospitality? Is it only the willingness to host people we like and agree with? Or is it being willing to let God “set a table for me in the presence of my enemies,” as the 23rd psalm puts it?
Hospitality is a good framework for how we engage the “Other,” whether that person is of a different ethnic, racial, sexual, financial or political group than us. What if we saw such encounters as the equivalent of offering water and a place to sit to a weary and parched traveler? We have different expectations of guests than we do of friends, and different expectations of ourselves as hosts. I still hope one day to launch a program interrupted by the Covid pandemic, a series of dinners I was calling, “Eating With Strangers,” which would invite people to break bread together and find ways to speak and listen respectfully across divisive issues.
Hospitality is a spiritual practice we are invited to cultivate in all kinds of ways. It could transform our lives – and our culture – if we found ourselves practicing it with people of whom we disapprove, even if we don't like where they've been or where they're going.
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