How Hollywood can help us understand hospitality

Biblical hospitality - welcoming strangers - is fading in Western Christian life, even though it is meant to be a core part of how Christian's show love. Maybe Hollywood can help us recover our sight. The stories we tell, often train us in what to expect from strangers. Odysseus’ story paints a picture of what happens when we treat strangers as threats. Scripture offers an alternative: where hospitality becomes an opportunity for blessing.  

The Odyssey is an ancient Greek poem that follows a man called Odysseus, King of Ithaca desperately trying to get home after his heroic victory in the Trojan War. Along the way, he meets a variety of strangers. Often, what happens next mirrors our Western sense of fear of strangers. 

One example, at the heart of the story, is Odysseus' encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus. Odysseus and his men enter his cave without permission. Several of them are eaten, but Odysseus manages to blind the cyclops and escape clinging to the belly of a sheep. As a result, he invokes the wrath of the god Poseidon, and finds himself hindered by his power. For Odysseus, “hospitality” often collapses into self-protection - which in turn provokes hostility.  

Notice the stark difference when we place a biblical encounter beside the cave scene. Entitlement is replaced by humility. In 1 Kings 17:8-24. The prophet Elijah is fleeing persecution and ends up in a town called Zarephath in Sidon. Since this is gentile territory, associated with Baal worship, he is a stranger in enemy land. The difference comes in how he approaches a stranger. Rather than encroaching on someone's space, he asks a poor widow for water and bread. He presents himself as dependent and vulnerable. As a result, he receives lodging and food.  

The story of scripture is meant to shape how we handle strangers. Elijah’s approach doesn’t erase differences, but frames them differently. When we encounter strangers, there will always be real and significant differences between us. We are each fearfully, wonderfully and uniquely made. And yet at the same time, we have more in common than we think and are more in need of blessing than we often care to admit. Humility in contrast to fear and hostility, often turns threat into friendship.  

As the biblical account moves on, Elijah reveals God’s promise of blessing: her last meal of flour and oil never runs out. While Odysseus defaults to fear and control, causing threat levels to escalate, Elijah asks and receives, creating the conditions for wholeness for everyone.  

In the Bible, hospitality is an opportunity to encounter God in unexpected ways: ways that train us to be expectant (like when Jesus speaks to the strangers on the road to Emmaus who don’t recognise him), rebuke our hard hearts (like when we fail to recognise Christ in the foreigner in Matthew 25), and bless us in our weakness (like the promise of entertaining angels in Hebrews 13). One of my favourite writers on hospitality Christine Pohl, once said words to this effect: that our open doors prepare the way for the quiet knock of angels.  

Of course, hospitality doesn’t need to be in a home. Welcoming strangers, the essence of hospitality, can happen in the pub or park, or over a flat white as much as in a flat - and it’s a key means of bridging cultural divides. Yet as it becomes increasingly alien to us, we can approach encounters with those who are different as a threat to be navigated more than an opportunity to be grasped.  

So the question to consider the next time you encounter a stranger, is this: will your first move be like Odysseus or like Elijah? Will fear lead to hostility or will humility interrupt fear?