Mark Brians
The Gospel of John tells us that on the night that he was betrayed, Jesus knew—at the outset of the evening—that “the Father had given him all things into his hands” (13:3 LEB). This is marvelous and strange and a loaded biblical image.
What the Bible means when it says “into his hands” is not dissimilar from what we mean when the villain in a superhero film says, “I’ll have them in the palm of my hand.” It means having dominion and sovereign power over another’s life. It is the phrase God deployed, for instance, when he gave Noah authority over the animals, placing them into his hand (Gen 9:2), and when he later encouraged the people of Israel not to fear the power of the Canaanites, because he was giving the inhabitants of the land into their hands (Exod 23:31).
Perhaps the most famous instance of the phrase occurs in 1 Samuel 24, when King Saul entered the cave in En Gedi to relieve himself, unaware that David and his men were hiding there. If ever David were to get his revenge on Saul, this would have been the perfect opportunity. His men told him in the cramped rear of the cavern, “Look, today is the day about which Yahweh said to you, ‘See, I am giving your enemy into your hand’” (v. 4 LEB).
What does Jesus do when all things are placed into his hands? He washes feet (John 13:4–5). He hosts a meal (Matt 26:17–19; Mark 14:14–15). He feasts (Luke 22:14–20). He displays at that table in the upper room the infinite hospitality of the triune God which will lead him, in fewer than twenty-four hours, to Calvary and to the realm of the dead.
Table of contents
Hospitality: a defining mark of Jesus’s ministry
Before we ask why, we should remember that hospitality has been the sign and mark of Jesus’s whole ministry.
He is the one who “eat(s) and drink(s) with the tax collectors and sinners” (Luke 5:30 LEB; see also Matt 9:10–11; Mark 2:16; Luke 15:1). He is the one who gathers the lost sheep of Israel into one flock and welcomes them along with other sheep (Luke 15:3–4; John 10:14–16). He is the one who comes to bind up the broken, heal the sick, and bring good news to the poor (Matt 9:12–13; Mark 2:17; Luke 4:18; e.g., Matt 14:14; Mark 6:53–56; John 6:24–25).
As a good host, he makes wine when the wedding runs out (John 2:1–11), multiplies bread in the wilderness (Matt 14:15–21; Mark 8:1–9; Luke 9:12–17; John 6:5–13), and throws parties when sinners repent (Luke 19:1–10; see also Luke 15:6–7, 9, 23–24). Even when he is a guest in other people’s homes, he is a host (e.g., Matt 9:10; Mark 1:29–33, 2:1–2, 15; Luke 10:38; John 12:1–2). If you are going to host Jesus, the rule seems to be, you’ll also be hosting all those whom Jesus is hosting.
Yahweh has always been the God who eats and drinks with sinners.
The Pharisees condemn him for all this conviviality: “Behold, a man who is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Matt 11:19 LEB). But they are judged by their own condemnation, for it evidences their own ignorance. They have forgotten who Yahweh is. Yahweh has always been the God who eats and drinks with sinners.
Hospitality’s divine origin
If conviviality means literally a “with-ing” of life, a co-sharing of living, from where else can it originate if not in the very life of the triune Godhead? Hospitality and welcome find their source in the very fount of deity. Creation thus flows from this eternal hospitality of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Creation is a welcoming act. God invites and beckons the created thing into existence, gives it a place, names it, calls it to be what it is, and “seats” it in the grand feast of the world. “And God say everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good” (Gen 1:31 LEB).
Into this feast, and for this feast, God makes Adam and Eve, his regal cup-bearers, to share in the festivity of the world. There they both participate in the making and naming and leading, as well as in the enjoying and the receiving of God’s good gifts. The God of welcome speaks, saying, “Let us make humankind in our image and according to our likeness” (Gen 1:26 LEB) and immediately gives humankind the world for food (vv. 29–30). As Alexander Schmemann reflects:
The first, the basic definition of man, is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God—and by filling the world with this Eucharist, he transforms his life, the one that he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with him.1
The fall of our first parents is a refusal of the welcome of God. We doubted the Great Host’s goodness. We chose not to eat with him and the food he gives. We chose to eat with the enemy. We did not wait for him to give us the food for which we longed and became thieves at the banquet of the world.2
Feasting with God throughout the story of Scripture
But our story, the Story, does not end there. Even though sin and the sting of death cast a long shadow on the world, even though our ability to extend the priestly welcome of prelapsarian Eden has been fraught by thorns, rivalry, and pain (Gen 3:16–19), God remains faithful. His welcome is strong, indeed.
All throughout the Old Testament, Yahweh makes a way of communion with himself. We are prone to forget that most sacrifices in Scripture compose a meal with God. Save for specific moments (the whole burnt offering, for instance), the worshipper who has drawn near to the Lord in response to his calling eats the “fire food” (אִשֶּׁה) of the altar.
I do not have space here to recount all of the places of festal communion, of hospitable feasting with God, from the Old Testament, but a few examples might be illustrative.
- Noah descends from the ark and shares a communion meal with God, and the smoke rises up as a sweet aroma (Gen 8:20–22).
- Abraham sees God approach in the form of three strangers and sets about preparing a meal to share with his Lord (Gen 18:1–8).
- Jacob establishes sites of communion meals when he re-enters the land after his exile in Haran (Gen 33:18–20; 35:1–15).
- The children of Israel feast with the Lord when he brings them up from the land of Egypt (e.g., Exod 24:11).
- When approached by the angel of the Lord, Gideon seizes the moment to prepare a meal (Judg 6:11–24).
Feasting with God, moreover, transforms people—those who receive his welcome become like him in extending the welcome in little ways all across the Story. Again, a few examples:
- Joseph, having been given everything by God, becomes the bread-giver of Egypt, and welcomes his brothers, those who had mistreated him, into his house to feast (Gen 43:16–17).
- Boaz, blessed by God and a righteous man, extends not merely the corners of his field with the widowed Ruth, but brings her into table fellowship with himself, giving her bread and wine (Ruth 2:14–16), just as Christ would give his disciples.
- When David receives the Ark of the Covenant into the tabernacle at Jerusalem, and after sharing many communion meals of “fire food” with Yahweh, he takes on the role of “host” by sending his people home, with gifts of rich food so that they might extend the table of Yahweh in their homes and families (2 Sam 6:5–19).
- When God’s people are under severe threat from the Agagite Haman, Esther exercises her queenly role in the defense of her people. What is her mode of protection? She prepares a feast, and not merely one feast, but two (Esth 5:1–8).
Hospitality is the mission of Jesus because it is the mission of God. Hospitality is who he is.
The ministry of Jesus, then, is not so much a novel change of plan, but a culminating fulfillment of the welcoming and feasting work of the living God. Hospitality is the mission of Jesus because it is the mission of God.3
Jesus spends the last night he has before he goes to the cross, with all power and dominion placed in his hands by the Father, showing hospitality—because hospitality is who he is.
Conduct a guided Bible study on hospitality using Logos’s Biblical Topic Study.
The church as an extension of Christ’s hospitality
As the body of Christ, the church is called to continue to minister hospitality. We who have received the hospitality of the triune God are called to extend that same hospitality to others.
The risen Jesus reveals himself in the breaking of bread (Luke 24:30) and in the hosting of a lake-side feast (John 21:9–14). Those disciples, following his example after the Day of Pentecost, devote themselves not only to teaching and prayer but also to fellowship and the breaking of bread (Acts 2:42).
This welcoming hospitality applies both to the brother or sister in Christ and to the stranger. Paul calls the Romans to “being devoted to one another in brotherly love” as well as to “pursuing hospitality” (12:10, 13 LEB). Similarly, the author of Hebrews calls his audience to neglect neither “brotherly love” nor “hospitality” (13:1–2 LEB). The word used for “hospitality” in both places is φιλοξενία—literally, “the love of the stranger.”
Gospel hospitality is therefore neither insular (loving only my brothers and sisters) nor is it merely a “missional strategy” (loving only those who are “out there”). Gospel hospitality gathers our whole selves (the part of me that has brothers and sisters in Christ, and the part of me that encounters strangers) into the welcoming, feasting, convivial life of the Trinity. If, through the hospitality of the cross, my life is now hidden with Christ in God (Col 3:3), my life takes on the shape of God’s welcome. My life becomes a site of God’s hospitality—a stage on which the drama of God’s hospitality is played out.
My life becomes a site of God’s hospitality—a stage on which the drama of God’s hospitality is played out.
The practice of Christian hospitality is, therefore, not merely additive to the message of the gospel; it is an implication and extension of the gospel as a matter of consequence. One of the things from which Christ has saved me is that which Byung-Chul Han describes as “an endless ego loop,” a self-absorptive vacuity and fathomless pride which leads, in the end, to our own self-erasure.4 God has liberated us from the old world of Adam with all of its inhospitableness (not fellowshipping with the living God, not fellowshipping with others) and carried us to the new world of Jesus who eats and drinks with sinners.
Early Christians of antiquity were renowned for their radical hospitality. The Epistle to Diognetus describes the way in which early believers shared “in all things with others.”5 Wherever Christians went, whether at home or abroad, whether stranger or native, they, like Jesus, became the host: “Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers.”6 The early church, like her Lord, gloriously shook up the easy distinctions between “host” and “guest.”7
So widespread was the early Christian reputation for radical hospitality, especially to those who would never be able to repay the welcome, that the pagan satirist Lucian could not quite conceal his very real awe beneath his ridicule: “The efficiency the Christians show whenever matters of community interest like this happen is unbelievable; they literally spare nothing.”8
It is this witness of gospel hospitality made by the early church which leads Antonia Tripolitis to the conclusion that “Christianity’s sense of community and its universal charity were a major reason, if not the most important reason, for its growth and subsequent victory over the empire.”9
Offering what’s been placed in our hands
The application of such a theology may feel daunting. We may, in fact, feel very much like the disciples in Mark 6: “Should we go and purchase bread for two hundred denarii and give it to them to eat?” (v. 37 LEB). The demand is beyond our wildest capabilities to achieve. How on earth can we possibly afford to extend the great grace we have ourselves received from God to a lost and broken world? How are we supposed to do this, moreover, in a culture which seems to lack any conviviality? Suddenly this cute article on “biblical hospitality” seems to lay upon us an unbearable yoke of futility.
We receive hope, I think, in what Jesus tells the disciples, who felt a similar weight and asked the question: “How many loaves do you have? Go look!” (v. 38 LEB). Jesus asks us to extend the welcome of his table at our own tables with what we have—with what the Father has placed into our hands, like Jesus on the night he is betrayed. We can put this in the form of a question, immediately applicable to any believer: How is God calling you, with whatever he has placed into your hands, to extend the hospitality of his kingdom to the world?
Learn to extend your ministry of hospitality with these resources
And You Welcomed Me: A Sourcebook on Hospitality in Early Christianity
Regular price: $20.89
Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, 25th anniversary ed.
Regular price: $22.99
The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World
Regular price: $14.99
Mobile Ed: NT391 Hospitality in the New Testament (6 hour course)
Regular price: $219.99
Related articles
- 2 Trees of Eden & What They Mean: Knowledge of Good & Evil vs. Life
- Acts of Persuasion: Why Did Gentiles Convert to Christianity?
- Finding (& Sharing) Jesus on the Romans Road to Salvation
- Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2018), 22.
- For a more full development of the eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, see my article, “2 Trees of Eden & What They Mean: Knowledge of Good & Evil vs. Life,” Word by Word, October 10, 2023.
- I draw here on the work that Drew Knowles and I did in our short book Hospitality: The Convivial Mission of God (Monroe, LA: Athanasius Press, 2024).
- Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today, trans. Wieland Hoban (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018), 3.
- Epistle to Diognetus, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Moscow, ID: Roman Roads Media, 2015), 4.
- Epistle to Diognetus, 4.
- This sentiment is captured beautifully in the words of the hymn by Hans Adolf Brorson, “Behold a Host Arrayed in White,” trans. Carl Doving: “They now enjoy the Sabbath rest, / the heav’nly banquet of the blest; / the Lamb, their Lord, at festal board / himself is host and guest.”
- Lucian, De Morte Peregrini, 13, quoted in R. A. Greer, Broken Lights and Mended Lives: Theology and Common Life in the Early Church (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), 119–20.
- Antonia Tripolitis, Religions of the Hellenistic-Roman Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 117.
Sean McGever
Elyse Fitzpatrick
Joseph Dodson
Jeffrey Wiesner