Hospitality Is a Commandment
Mark Hamilton
One of the oddest passages in the New Testament is Hebrews 13:2, which charges Christians not to “neglect hospitality since through it, some have shown hospitality to angels without realizing it.” There are undoubtedly many good reasons to be hospitable: to please God, to reflect Jesus’ command to love our neighbors, to make the world better, to increase our own happiness, to inspire reciprocal actions in others, to learn from people different from ourselves and probably others less obvious. But to show hospitality because you might sit across the table from angels? That’s a pretty strange reason.
Before dismissing this text as simply overblown rhetoric, however, perhaps we should understand it a little better. It has something important to say to us today.
To begin, this line obviously refers to a story in the Old Testament, Genesis 18, in which Abraham and Sarah serve dinner to three strangers who have stumbled across their camp while on the road to investigate charges against Sodom and Gomorrah.
