Hospitality: The Heart of the Gospel
Feast of Saint Benedict (trans.)
13 July 2025
The Rev’d Devin McLachlan
Back in the mid-90’s, when I was an English teacher in rural Hungary, I would spend Sunday afternoons out on a farm outside of Szentes, where my friend Saci’s[1] parents lived. Saci’s father would bring out the homemade pálinka,and her mother would load my plate with dumplings and pörkölt or gulyás[2]. Being a good Midwestern kid, I made sure to finish everything on my plate. It wasn’t a burden to do so — Saci’s mother was an excellent cook, and I was a hungry 22 year old who cooked for himself the rest of the week. But there was a problem:
You see, in my people’s culture, a good guest eats everything on their plate. In Hungary, finishing everything on your plate is a signal that your host has not given you enough to eat. SoSaci’s mother kept piling more nokedliand gulyás on my plate, and I kept trying to finish everything off. Between that and the homemade palinka, my Sunday evenings were a bit of a blur when I got home.
Hospitality is culturally complicated, downright fraught. If you’re the guest, do you arrive to dinner on time, or ten minutes late? Do you bring wine? Flowers? Nothing? Desert? If you are the host, how much do you tidy the house,and how do you get people to leave at the end of the dinner? Culture, class, neurodiversity, generation and upbringing all have a significant impact on our practices of hospitality.
But hospitality is a practice not just of culture, but of faith. Of course, Christian hospitality doesn’t answer many questions you might send to Miss Manners: Jesus didn’t say anything about salad forks (although in Matthew 23, he did speak about the importance of washing the inside and not just the outside of dishes and cups…).
But our patron saint, Saint Benedict,had a great deal to say about the Christian practice of Hospitality. Benedict dedicates a whole chapter to welcoming guests.
It’s chapter 53; he has already ordered his house, instructed his brothers on how to pray together, discern and lead, order their lives and live with one another. But the rule of Benedict is not intended for a desert hermitage, but for a community of faith within the larger community of humankind.
And so our Benedict declares:Omnes supervenientes hospitestam quam Christus suscipiantur. ‘All guests’ [Benedict’s word is hospites, not just ‘invited guests’ but strangers and visitors] ‘must be welcomed as Christ himself. For Christ will say: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Matt 25:35).”
Benedict goes in to say that strangers should met by the abbot cum omni officio caritatis, “with every duty of love,” with a kiss of peace and a deep bow, but first of all, they are to pray together. Scripture will be read, the abbot may wish the guest’s hands and feet and sit with them at table. Benedict concludes his instruction by writing: “Great care and concern are to be shown in receiving poor people and pilgrims, because in them more particularly Christ is received.”
Welcome goes far beyond a cheery hello. Welcome involves humility, prayer, service, and above all, love. Hospitality isn’t just a nice idea— hospitality is a command from God.
The Biblical call to hospitality —whether it is Abram welcoming the three under the Oak of Mamre,or Jesus breaking bread with outcasts and sinners —it’s the very heart of the Gospel.To follow Christ is to welcome Christ into our hearts. And the only way to welcome Christ into our hearts,is to welcome the stranger, the alien in the land, the homeless poor, the discomforting and the lost.
A little more than five hundred years after Benedict’s death, the little market town of Cambridge was growing at the edge of the Fens, the furthest navigable point for boats bringing grain from East Anglia to the North Sea port of Lynn, and offloading imports from Europe. There may have been another 10 churches in Cambridge, but here the people of Cambridge erected a stone church, whose tower still stands a thousand years later. Only ten years earlier, Vikings had burned Cambridge to the ground. Erecting this church was a labour of courage and of great faith in the face of violence, pillage, disorder and fear.
Dedicating the church to Saint Benedict, founder of western monasticism, might have been a defiant act of order in the teeth of chaos,of stone and stability in uncertain times;and perhaps of English pride in the work of reformers like St Dunstanand King Edgar the Peacemaker, who re-introduced Benedictine monasticism to England. But what kept St Bene’t’s standing was more than stone and strength.It was Benedict’s humility, it was Benedict’s hospitality.
For a thousand years and more, this church has lived out St Benedict’s call to welcome every visitor, every stranger, as Christ himself. It’s how you ended up here. Someone, perhaps someone still in this church today, bade you welcome. You came to this place, seeking shelter, seeking hope, seeking peace, seeking to be fed at Christ’s table. As the hymn goes:
As Christ breaks bread and bids us share, each proud division ends.
The love that made us makes us one, and strangers now are friends.[3]
And now that ministry of hospitality is yours: Welcoming the stranger and the visitor.Inviting a friend to church. Serving those in need. Reaching out to a neighbour, befriending a newcomer at church. Remembering that prayer is an act of hospitality: Sharing prayer, offering to pray, bringing others into your life of prayer. Striving to help the church be a community which welcomes and serves all peoplein the name of Jesus Christ; a church inclusive in our welcome, refusing to discriminate by disability, economic power, ethnicity, gender and gender identity, learning disability, mental health, neurodiversity, orsexuality.
That we might welcome into the home of our heart Christ himself, welcoming him in that he might welcome us to that eternal home,where none shall ever be estranged again.
[1]Pronounced “Shaht-si,” a nickname
[2]Two excellent Hungarian stews, which by the way they make quite well at Tastes of Hungary, on Chesterton Road
[3] Brian A. Wren, b.1936, ‘I come with joy’