Progressive reflections on the lectionary #118
Matthew 10:40-42 Hospitality as resistance
This week we look at the importance of small things - the offer of a glass of water to a weary traveller - and recognise their importance. In a world where the logic of scarcity dominates, hospitality is the core of resistance. Don’t take my word for it - read the Bible, it’s well attested. I will say, here, that the offer of a ‘cup of water’ to the itinerant disciple is much more significant than it appears. I also look briefly at the idea of ‘reward’ and in my ‘process insight’ I talk about the nature of reality being made up of interconnected networks, or societies, of small things. This is true in physical, and metaphysical terms.
The weary traveller reaches an outpost, built close to a water source. At the well they encounter a woman. “Can I have a drink?” they ask. It’s a story that is told many times in the Bible, it usually has some sort of connotation of union or congress, but it is also, fundamentally, a story about hospitality and alignment and one which Jesus harks back to in this week’s passage.
Hospitality is the Bible’s most consistent critique of exclusion. The practise, or offer of hospitality is the refusal to let fear dictate who belongs. It is the insistence that every person should be cared for, that everyone has worth.
It also symbolises the reality that resistance, and the practise of justice, begins with the simple, risky act of making space for ‘the other’. The contemporary political ramifications are pretty obvious, I think, as is the clear rebuke of the sort of exclusionary theology that chooses to promote fear and distrust of the stranger, rather than offer welcome.
The clearest story about hospitality in the Bible is perhaps the story of Sodom and Gomorrah (even though it’s routinely misinterpreted). The moral of the story is not to do with sexual excess but is instead a critique of vile (and violent) inhospitality.
A vulnerable family offers shelter to even more vulnerable strangers and the whole town responds with mob violence. The prophetic tradition remembers this as the neglect of the poor, and a refusal to welcome those in need. The ultimate destruction of the city is due to its hostility to outsiders.
Encounters with ‘the stranger’ become the tradition’s most totemic stories. Abraham runs to welcome three travellers; Rebekah draws water for a foreigner; a hungry Elijah is fed by a widow on the brink of starvation; Jesus breaks protocol to ask for water from the Samaritan woman. In each case ordinary people defy the logic of scarcity, the principle of caution and the boundaries of social expectation to put the practise of welcome first. Hospitality is presented as a revolutionary act in a world which prefers self-protection.
In the telling of the stories of Jesus, he is routinely presented as someone who is in need of welcome. There is “no room at the inn;” Jesus is the perennial guest, with no place of his own; his followers are told that whenever they welcome the least, they welcome him.
This principle is what makes, and shapes, the early church - a community of vulnerable people who nevertheless choose to make the radical choice to open their doors to strangers, and to the most vulnerable. No wonder the totemic ritual of the early Christians is the shared meal.
This is what it means to show love, we learn. The presence of God is found not in temples or palaces but at kitchen tables.
In first‑century Palestine, water is not trivial - the act of fetching it exposes one to risk, and involves labour. It’s costly. At the same time to offer water is to offer life - the refusal to offer it is to make the positive decision to exclude. When, in our reading this week, Jesus says: “whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple - truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward…" he is encouraging small acts of solidarity that can, ultimately, reshape society.
“Your life matters enough for me to share my limited resources with you.”
The passage is a continuation of the mission discourse, the disciples are sent to take an alternative ‘gospel’ to that of the empire, so to welcome them, to offer them hospitality, even just to give them water, is to identify with their cause and to risk being seen as one of them.
“Whoever welcomes one of these little ones…” Jesus says, speaking not about children, but about those who have none of the status or significance of the ‘big ticket’ evangelists. It’s a continuation of his status reversal idea - divine presence found in ordinary places and ordinary people. It comes, of course, after Jesus has spoken about the dangers faced by those who follow him, the loss of place, kinship ties and protection.
In political terms this fits within the wider pattern of ‘representation.’ Jesus makes this clear: “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”
According to the legal practise of the time to receive the envoy is to receive the ruler. To reject the envoy is to reject the ruler. What this does is to cascade importance and power - the most marginal of people take on the significance and status of the ‘master’, this breaks down the hold on power that had been claimed by the governmental, or quasi governmental structures of temple, priesthood, or empire.
To host, or to welcome, someone is to align with them, and to risk being identified with their cause. The same thing continues today, of course. Churches have to choose whether to rent their halls or spaces to political parties: to rent a room to Restore is to risk being seen as aligned with their divisive agenda.
So the household that opens its doors, or even just offers refreshment to the emissary of Jesus is enacting resistance. No matter the act may only be small - it remains a refusal to let empire or even familial expectation have the last word.
Later in the gospel the criteria by which people are judged becomes how they treat the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, or imprisoned person. The “cup of cold water” foreshadows, or anticipates that larger vision.
And all of this leads to ‘reward’, of course. In our culture ‘reward’ will generally mean something individualistic, or more broadly a material gain or even the promise of a paradisical afterlife. That’s not what it means here. Instead “reward” is being drawn into the relational community. It is the joy and cost of shared struggle - it’s the promise of shared resource, “reward” is a different kind of social order.
Process Insight
I feel like I’ve written about the idea that God does not coerce but instead lures us toward greater justice, beauty, and etc a few times already. So rather than focus on this, or indeed the relational nature of the text, I want to point out that in process thought insists that every small thing is important.
In fact there are no ‘big things’ really - only collections of ‘small things’.
Everything is made up of cells, cells are made of atoms, atoms are made of sub-atomic particles which are sites of movement and energy. Solid things are largely made up of energy. Solidity itself is something of an illusion.
So yes, the reality we experience around us is, largely, an illusion. That ‘tree’ you can see over there is actually mainly energy, it is also a large group of small things, working together to be a tree. In that sense a ‘tree’ is a ‘society’, or even a ‘society of societies’ - we just think of it as an individual thing because that’s how it looks to us. In reality it’s nothing of the sort. And of course, the same is true of you, and the same is true of me. We are very complex, very sophisticated, societies. We contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman put it. Apart from anything else, you currently contain something like a kilogram of bacteria in your internal organs. Good luck living without them.
So here we are encouraged not to despise ‘the day of small things’ - even the smallest act of care has a real impact. Offering someone a glass of water is not ‘just’ symbolic of an alignment with their cause, it’s also a real piece of participation in the constantly evolving web of relations.
It’s part of that idea: “for the want of the nail the shoe was lost, for the want of a shoe the horse was lost, for the want of a horse the battle was lost…” The smallest things, the most insignificant things, have real importance.
So here the writer imagines a network of households choosing to offer welcome to emissaries of Jesus, small things, vulnerable things. Moment by moment choices that shape the future. Depending on how you look at it, that’s either a deeply encouraging idea, or a terrifying one.
Progressive Reflections On the Lectionary are intended to be useful to people who preach, or are interested in why on earth anyone still reads the Bible.