Saved by Faith and Hospitality

Joshua W. Jipp

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780802875051
• eBook ISBN: 9781467448734
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Too few Christians today, says Joshua Jipp, understand hospitality to strangers and the marginalized as an essential part of the church's identity. In this book Jipp argues that God's relationship to his people is fundamentally an act of hospitality to strangers, and that divine and human hospitality together are thus at the very heart of Christian faith.
Jipp first provides a thorough interpretation of the major biblical texts related to the practice of hospitality to strangers, considering especially how these texts portray Christ as the divine host who extends God's welcome to all people. Jipp then invites readers to consider how God's hospitality sets the pattern for human hospitality, offering suggestions on how the practice of welcoming strangers can guide the church in its engagement with current social challenges—immigration, incarceration, racism, and more.

PART ONE

Divine Hospitality

CHAPTER 1

Food, Stigma, and the Identity of the Church in Luke-Acts

Whom you eat with can say a lot about who you are or at least about who you think you are. Think about the meals you’ve shared with another person or group in the past few weeks or so. Who comes to mind? For most of us, the companions at our meals will be friends, family, and co-workers—people who are generally already part of our normal societal surroundings. It is unlikely that our table companions will include anyone of a different socio-economic bracket or another religion, someone struggling with a severe addiction, someone chronically homeless, or someone with a physical disability or with a serious mental illness. I am not trying to make you feel guilty. My meals generally also revolve around family, friends, and colleagues or students at my seminary. Handing a homeless person some money for food is much easier and, of course, much less intimate than sharing a meal together. Sharing meals, eating with someone at the same table, and receiving guests into one’s home (and entering into others’ homes as a guest) function as opportunities to increase our friendship and intimacy with others.

Luke’s Gospel and his second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, are filled with the language and elements of hospitality—food, meals, houses, and traveling—in order to express something significant about Jesus’s identity, namely, how God’s hospitality is extended to his lost, broken, needy, and often stigmatized people. This divine hospitality comes to us in the person of Jesus, the divine host who extends God’s hospitality to sinners, outcasts, and strangers and thereby draws them—and us—into friendship with God. God’s embrace of humanity into friendship with him is the ultimate form of welcoming the stranger. But divine hospitality does not end with our experience of God’s welcome; it also elicits human hospitality. In other words, our friendship with God is the foundation of and cause for our friendship with one another. Jesus grants divine hospitality to the “other” without distinction, and this is exemplified in his welcome to sinners and the religious, men and women, rich and poor, and Jews and Gentiles. Jesus shows no apprehension or fear of associating with the stigmatized in society. And, further, he is markedly unimpressed by appeals to ethnicity, status, formal religious observance, and gender as means of social worth or worth before God. Thus, divine welcome does not correspond to some type of merit or preexisting social worth, for Jesus’s extension of divine hospitality appears as indiscriminate—which is precisely the feature of Jesus’s ministry that annoys so many of the religious leaders of his time.

God’s hospitality toward us and our friendship with God create the foundation for friendship within the church. In other words, divine hospitality is enacted in our friendship and hospitality toward others who have been welcomed into God’s family. Humans are created for friendship with God and for friendship with one another, but both sets of relationships have been fractured by disordered desires for wealth, status, and power, by the creation of boundaries and divisions that separate and prevent peaceful and authentic communication and result in judgments upon one another, and ultimately by sin and hubris that mar our relationship with God. The Gospel of Luke introduces us to a Savior who both restores our broken friendship with God and thereby heals our broken relationships with one another.

This divine hospitality is often enacted through Jesus’s sharing of meals, meals that are anticipations of the final feast with the Messiah. These meals are marked by joy, generosity, inclusivity, the rejection of status and hierarchy, and most importantly—the experiential and saving presence of the Messiah among his people. Jesus’s final meal with his disciples ritualizes his hospitality practices and insures that the presence of the risen Messiah will continue to meet, heal, and transform those who share in the meals of the church. The church’s hospitality meals indicate that the primary marker of the identity of the church is that it is the recipient of God’s hospitality. And if Jesus’s extension of hospitality is the basis of our friendship with God, then the fact that he is markedly unconcerned with purity or contamination by the intimate act of sharing meals with sinners and society’s stigmatized should have consequences for how we, too, think about the vocation of the church. In other words, the church is called to participate in Jesus’s hospitality among sinners and outcasts by embracing a stigmatized identity that follows from sharing life together with all of God’s people. The church must recover its role as the context for embodying God’s hospitality by considering what it might look like to embrace a stigmatized identity through acts such as visiting and caring for the incarcerated community in North America.¹

The Year of the Lord’s Welcome

Clearly, Jesus’s identity and teaching are foundational for the church’s understanding of its identity and vocation. Before we begin to examine what Jesus says about his mission, we need to take note of one important aspect of divine hospitality, namely, the depiction of God as the divine host who nourishes his people.² In Israel’s Scriptures God is often portrayed as the host of Israel as he provides manna and quail in the wilderness (Exod 16:4, 15; Num 11:1–9; Deut 8:3, 16; Pss 78:24–38 and 105:40; Neh 9:15), spreads a table of peace and divine nourishment for the Psalmist (Ps 23), and, as the owner of the land, grants Israel the gift of benefiting from that land as his guests (Lev 25:23). But God also promises his people that one day he will act to inaugurate his kingdom, will save his people, and will make known his presence in full by means of a banquet feast between God and his people. God’s climactic act of salvation for his people will come, then, in the form of God sharing his presence with his people through shared hospitality.

Multiple Old Testament texts look forward to this day. For instance, Isaiah 25:6–9 says,

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

Isaiah is obviously looking forward to something more than a tasty meal. The full and complete shared presence between God and his people, an experience of divine presence such that we cry out, “This is our God! We have waited for him,” is symbolized through God providing and sharing with us this banquet feast.³ The prophet Isaiah anticipates God’s fulfillment of the promises made to David and invites the hungry and thirsty:

Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. (Isa 55:1–2)

The prophet Ezekiel says that when God sends his Davidic Messiah to shepherd his people, one of his tasks will be to provide food and nourishment for them (Ezek 34:23–24). In other words, Israel looks forward to a time when God and God’s Messiah come to share divine welcome, salvation, and peaceful relationship with Israel by means of shared hospitality and table fellowship between God and his people.⁴

This is the context for understanding Jesus’s meals and table-fellowship, as Jesus’s meals extend God’s hospitality and offer a foretaste of the eschatological banquet to all kinds of people in the Gospel of Luke. Let’s begin with Jesus’s well-known Nazareth sermon in Luke 4:16–30.⁵ When Jesus enters into the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth, he turns to Isaiah and reads:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to preach release for the captives and sight for the blind, and to give release to the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s welcome. (4:18–19; emphasis added [my trans.])

First, Jesus’s ministry enacts the Lord God’s hospitality. Jesus declares that “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me” (4:18a) and that his ministry is “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s welcome” (4:19). The phrase “Spirit of the Lord” refers to God’s Spirit, and the second phrase (in 4:19) is a quotation of Isaiah 61:2a, so no doubt the primary referent of “Lord” is the God of Israel. Jesus’s ministry, then, is both empowered by God’s Spirit and a manifestation of God’s welcome.⁶ In other words, “the year of the Lord’s welcome” is established and enacted throughout Luke’s Gospel in the ministry of the Lord Jesus.⁷ The point is simple but important: Jesus is more than a prophet or important religious leader; his ministry is an embodiment of God’s hospitality toward the stranger and the oppressed.

Second, most English translations of the Bible render the italicized portion of Jesus’s speech as “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” instead of “welcome.” While this is a perfectly acceptable translation of the Greek word dektos, given that Luke uses the same word in 4:24 to refer to a prophet’s lack of welcome in his hometown, Luke’s frequent use of the dech- root for hospitality (for instance, in 9:5, 48, 53; 10:8–10; see also Acts 10:35), and the fact that the recipients of the Lord’s welcome are stereotypical outsiders in need of welcome, it makes good sense to understand 4:19 as Jesus’s programmatic proclamation that he has come to enact divine welcome and hospitality to the stranger and the outcast. The programmatic function of Jesus’s Nazareth sermon invites the reader to pay attention to the way in which the entirety of Jesus’s ministry and particularly his meals with strangers enact divine hospitality to the poor, the captives, the blind, and the oppressed.

Third, the phrase “to give release to the oppressed,” quoted by Jesus in Luke 4:18b, comes from Isaiah 58:6, and it is worth quoting the prophetic oracle in more detail: “Isn’t this the fast I choose: to break the chains of wickedness, to loose the ropes of the yoke, to give release to the oppressed, and to tear off every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, to bring the poor and homeless into your house, to clothe the naked when you see him and not to ignore your own flesh and blood?” (Isa 58:6–7). Both Isaiah 61:1–2 and 58:6–7, which are the texts quoted by Jesus in Luke 4:18–19, share the words “release” and “welcome” and indicate that Jesus’s ministry will provide the social justice, release, forgiveness of debts, and hospitality that Israel’s prophets had demanded of Israel.⁸ The entire ministry of Jesus is appropriately captured in the phrase “divine hospitality to the stranger and sinner.”⁹

Jesus—Divine Host to Strangers and Sinners

If Jesus’s mission is to enact the Lord’s hospitality as set forth in Isaiah, then it is no surprise that Luke portrays Jesus as an actual host who dispenses the Lord’s welcome by sharing meals with strangers, sinners, and outsiders. In fact, one of the primary ways in which Jesus enacts the year of divine welcome is by sharing his saving presence with all kinds of people at meals. It is precisely through Jesus’s eating meals with outsiders that he creates the hospitable space where outsiders experience the saving presence of God and are thereby transformed from strangers to friends of God. For example, Jesus interprets the “great feast” (5:29) that is hosted by Levi the tax collector as signifying Jesus’s healing of Levi’s ruptured relationships (5:31–32). Jesus’s meal with Simon the Pharisee, ironically, provides the hospitable space for the so-called “sinful woman” to encounter the saving presence of Jesus, a presence that enables her to experience divine forgiveness, peace, and incorporation into the people and kingdom of God (7:36–50).¹⁰ Zacchaeus’s quest to see Jesus is more than fulfilled when Jesus demands hospitality from the tax collector: “I must receive hospitality in your house today” (19:5). After their shared hospitality, Jesus makes a ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Christine Pohl
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction: Saved by Faith and Hospitality
• Part One: Divine Hospitality
• Part Two: Human Hospitality
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index of Names and Subjects
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Writings