Hospitality Leads to New Life

Homily for the Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary TIme

The readings for the Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time revolve around two overlapping themes, that of new life as the gift of God, and that of the virtue of hospitality. The first reading takes us once more to the story of Elisha who, because of the many miracles told of him, is seen by Christians as a kind of foreshadowing of Jesus. Certainly, the stories told about him served as the literary prototypes of some of the stories about Jesus as they were formulated by the earliest Christians. In this case, a woman of influence and means who is childless offers most generous hospitality to the prophet; she persuades her husband to have a small apartment built onto the house which will be reserved for Elisha so that he may have a place to rest whenever he comes that way. The prophet will not be out done, and promises her the one thing that her wealth and her connections cannot obtain, but which God alone can grant – a child. New life is God’s own gift, and God rewards with divine hospitality the human hospitality offered to the prophet who is God’s servant. It is important to recognize that this woman has not ask for any reward for hospitality. She freely provides it simply because she recognizes Elisha as a man of God.

The second reading forms a kind of counterpoint theme to this: Paul begs the community in Rome to recognize the gift of new life which God’s hospitality has bestowed on them, and really to live that new life. In the resurrection of Jesus, we have a new birth – not a biological birth as in the Elisha story but a rebirth into the life of the Spirit. This also calls for us to be hospitable to the presence of God’s grace, to Jesus and the Spirit of Jesus. Paul writes of it as death to an old way of life, spelled out in baptism as burial with Christ, to be reborn from the tomb so that our feet are set upon the new path of life. In order to find new life, we must lose the old life. The imagery here is rather alien to the imagination formed by our culture, but we need to reflect upon it and ease our way into it.

The Gospel text returns to the dominant theme of hospitality, but it includes two rather disparate sets of sayings of Jesus, of which the first ends again with the action of losing and gaining life. The passage forms part of the larger collection of sayings gathered together by Matthew as instructions with which Jesus sends out the Twelve on a preaching mission, two by two. We have been reading about this particular episode from the Gospels for the past three weeks now. Because the apostles will make this journey, this mission, with no money and with not even a change of clothes, they are going to be dependent upon the hospitality of the people to whom they bring the message of the nearness of God’s kingdom. Today’s excerpt begins with a ruthless statement of the kind of detachment necessary for an apostle, but balances that with the observation that what must look like death is in fact new life. From that point, the narrator turns to sayings of Jesus about those who offer hospitality to the disciples. No slightest act of hospitality is to go unrewarded: the reward for entertaining a prophet is a prophet’s reward, of entertaining a good man is a good man’s reward. The reward for entertaining a disciple of Jesus is such as only Jesus himself can give.

The context which the liturgy provides is suggestive because we have just been reminded that the reward of the prophet Elisha was new life. So, the two themes intertwine; God’s hospitality always outdoes ours, because God gives life itself. When we think what is asked of us is sheer death, we may find that it is really a breakthrough to new life.