The Incarnation, Eden, & Hospitality
A postscript on Luke 10:1-11
Luke 10:1-11 calls us to think about the mission of the church. However, this gospel invites us not to impose our ideas of mission onto this text but to learn about mission from this text. Jesus defines the missiological approach of his disciples as hospitality. Not their hospitality to others, but he calls them to be recipients of hospitality.
As unusual as this may sound at first, if we draw ourselves back to Genesis we can easily read this frame of “recipients of hospitality” in the Creation narrative. Kevin O’Gorman lays it out expertly for us:
Within the Old Testament, numerous references exist to the practice of hospitality and serve as hosts, and to treating human life with respect and dignity. In the Book of Genesis, God offers the newly created world as living space and its plants and trees as food to all living creatures; they are to be guests in God’s world and at God’s table. In other words, while enjoying God’s gracious provisions, God’s human guests are to preserve awareness of and respect God’s ultimate ownership. The story goes on to relate the ‘fall of man’ and the expulsion from Eden. Adam and Eve eating from the forbidden tree is an act of disobedience therefore sin in this situation can be defined as disobedience. Janzen then makes the challenging observation that Adam and Eve are saying “we (humanity) want unlimited use and control of the world. In this light, sin can be described as the human attempt to be owners, rather than guests”.1
I deeply appreciate and enjoy O’Gorman’s approach. It changes not just how I read Genesis, but how I read the incarnation. When we add this perspective to what we already think about the incarnation we see Jesus’ recreating Adam and Eve’s roles as the Father’s guest in creation. Jesus chooses, as Paul explains in Philippians 2, to step into the world as servant.
Athanasius notes Jesus’s actions as a choice in On the Incarnation (26)
It was evident to all that it was from no natural weakness that the body which the Word indwelt had died, but in order that in it by the Saviour's power death might be done away.
This is important for the Church Fathers. Like Athanasius here, they are often at pains to show how Jesus isn’t cornered by weakness in the world, rather, affirming what John’s Gospel shows us, Christ’s incarnation, suffering, and death were embraced willingly by Jesus. They were not things that happened to him, but rather, as
regularly reminds me, he happened to them.Jesus is a guest in this world because he wants be, and wants us to see this.
The Greeks believed that no less than Zeus watched to ensure that hospitality was properly practiced. The Romans, Jupiter. And yet the New Testament shows us Christ as willing guest in his own creation. He comes as the one in need of hospitality.
We meet him as baby accepted by a step-father (Matthew 1:24-25), he has nowhere to lay his head (Luke 9:58), he offers peace to those around him (John 20:21), he is a guest of others (Luke 19:7), he eats and drinks at the hospitality of others (Matthew 11:19), he heals the sick (Luke 7), and announces that “the kingdom of God has come near” (Mark 1:15).
Christ models for humanity what humanity was always supposed to be. Guests. Guests of God. Guests in Eden. So with this in mind, note the gospel reading:
Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals, and greet no one on the road. Whatever house you enter, first say, 'Peace to this house!' And if a person of peace is there, your peace will rest on that person, but if not, it will return to you. Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the laborer deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to house. Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, 'The kingdom of God has come near to you.' (Luke 10:4-9)
Jesus asks the 72 to do only things that we have seen him do. But, perhaps more importantly, they are guests, they require hospitality. Note in the full reading the question of welcome or not being welcome defines whether or not the disciples stay.
The disciples are to go out in the world not just generically imitating Jesus, if you’ll forgive that term, but they are empowered to imitate Jesus as guests. They are able to imitate Jesus being fully human in the way that humans after Eden have been unable to do so.
Somehow (I say with all the theological weight that “somehow” can carry) Jesus has become a guest in his own creation in order to allow us to step up into being fully human again. Ironically the gospel shows us that while we tried to be owners and not guests, as if this was the way to being “like God”, God himself was becoming a guest to show us that to be like him is what we are initially and originally made to be.
The incarnation of Jesus is showing us how to be in the world. How to live out the gospel. How to be a people of peace. How to come home.
It is not in power, in colonizing, in monopolizing. But as guests.
O'Gorman, K.D. (2007) Dimensions of Hospitality: Exploring Ancient Origins. He cites W. Janzen, W. (2002) Biblical Theology of Hospitality. Vision, A Journal for Church and Theology. 3:1.