Loving the Stranger
We need to be aware of how powerful the drives are that tear us apart. When St Paul writes, ‘the love of Christ constrains us’, he grasps something that does the opposite, that drives us together, holds us, even forces us to embrace actions we would not, could not, otherwise take.
‘Practise hospitality to strangers’: this is surely one of those actions. The stranger within and the stranger without – the person or thing that is alien, with which we are uncomfortable and that would otherwise press towards alienation, separation.
Etymologically, the words ‘guest’ and ‘host’ are related. The guest is the ‘other’, the stranger. The ‘host’ might be hostile, or hospitable. It is a strange thing to conceive that hostility and hospitality have the same root. Strangers encountering one another might be enemies or friends. It is easy for us naturally to suspect the ‘other’ might be an enemy. But the love of Christ constrains us …
Think for a moment about table etiquette. Imagine the potential violence of the mealtime encounter between host and guest – all those knives and forks and teeth! No wonder a meal with family or neighbours is liable to descend into quarrelling or even violence, like a play by Alan Ayckbourn. The social conventions can sometimes just be a mask for the vicious confrontations that lie below the surface.
St Paul’s ‘case study’ is the Letter to Philemon – he has written earlier, ‘in Christ there is no more slave or free’ – but now, will this work out in practice? How can this philoxenia, or stranger-love, work out between Philemon and Onesimus, between master and fugitive slave? In the letter, the triad of relationships Paul – Onesimus – Philemon are formed onto an equal footing.
An alienated relationship reduces the other person to a thing, just as Karl Marx argued was happening to industrial workers whose alienated labour was merely a source of self-enrichment by the owners of the means of production. This was not a personal relationship.
The restored relationship recognizes the other person; and this needs to be done, not just asserted. Engagement with persons is needed, not just holding ‘politically correct’ opinions. For example, supposing one church hopes to convert the local Muslims to Christianity and to that end engages with them, whereas another holds the more ‘correct’ view that all religions should be respected, and so makes no contact with the local Muslim community at all. Neither approach is wholly right or wrong, but the action of the first church counts for more than the right thoughts of the second. You have to make contact: you cannot simply come armed with theoretical principles.
Do we let the stranger come so close that we are changed? We might be confronted with our own prejudices. Remember Oliver Cromwell’s words: ‘I beseech you to think it possible that you may be mistaken’.
The capacity to love others is bound up with that for loving ourselves. Hospitality outwardly depends on hospitality inwardly, welcoming ourselves, or the ‘other’, the alien within us, the hidden and unacceptable part. You cannot ‘cross out the I’ (eradicate the self), or there will be no-one there to welcome others into. We cannot accept ourselves by subtraction – cutting bits out – or by abstraction – trying to live up to an external model. We have to learn to live with the ambiguity within ourselves. We cannot carry out a sort of ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the soul. So too for our approach to others: not subtraction, refusing to see the bits we don’t like, or abstraction, seeing only a stereotype – not denial, but redemption.
How easy it is for the host to have power over the guest! But Israel were told, ‘You know the heart of the alien, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt’. But in our history, in Europe, the memory is of being the Egyptians: the taskmasters, not the aliens and slaves, with whom we are called to identify. Israel are told to keep the Sabbath for the sake of the alien: for their needs are the same as ours. They are told to care for the alien precisely because ‘I am the Lord your God’. God being ‘their God’ does not mandate domination.
Faith goes with tolerance: the First Commandment (there is a God who is absolute) and also the Second: to beware of making an absolute out of our own limited image and understanding of God. If we are to come to terms with the stranger – the alien, the enemy, the disliked person – we must come to terms with God as stranger, God as the one we do not know.
It is about our incompleteness without the stranger. God’s nature is to be the ‘homeless stranger’, outside the city wall. Our calling is to go outside also: ‘here we have no abiding city’. We should never settle into the comfort zone of our own like-mindedness. We know God only in the restless thirst for God that presses on. ‘If we think that we know God, it is not God that we know’ (St Augustine)
.