Hope and Hospitalityਨਮੂਨਾ

A Servant’s Meal

Luke 22 records one of the most significant meals in scripture. The guests gather for supper in an upstairs dining room. It’s supposed to be a celebration, but the mood is strangely sombre: two of the people in the room are about to die.

It’s significant that the last thing Jesus chooses to do with his twelve disciples is get them together for the Passover meal, which symbolised the Israelites’ freedom from captivity in Egypt half a millennium before. Except, this won’t be a regular Passover celebration. Jesus begins the meal with a cryptic announcement about his imminent suffering. Then He rewrites the script of the age-old meal rituals and introduces new ones – pouring out wine and breaking bread in reference to Himself. In a cosmic turn of events, He’s claiming to be the sacrificial Lamb of God.

The simple, visual aid Jesus offers us – bread and wine – reminds us of God’s astonishing hospitality to us and still speaks to us today. Firstly, hospitality is for the whole person. It’s about not just filling someone’s hungry stomach but more importantly, ministering to their hungry soul.

Secondly, hospitality is for the whole world. Jesus knows Peter will deny Him and Judas will betray Him, and yet still He welcomes them to the table, and He selflessly serves them. It seems Jesus didn’t draw the line, in terms of who He would and wouldn’t invite to sit at His table. Case in point: He’s invited you and me. That hardly seems fair, does it?

Thirdly, hospitality is for the whole of time. Jesus’ sacrificial death resets our understanding of both the past and the future. Jesus expected this meal to be repeated until the end of time. As long as there is bread on our tables and wine in our glasses, we cannot help but look forward to the time when we will be reunited with Him. Hospitality comes with hope.

Fourthly, hospitality is wholehearted. I’d urge you not to engage in what I think of as ‘hospitality mathematics’ – totting up all the meals you’ve provided for others plus who you’ve invited for dinner (and who has or hasn’t reciprocated). Our hospitality should be generous and self-forgetful, not competitive, begrudging, or transactional. Of course, when we think about God’s wholehearted hospitality towards us, it makes our comparisons and one-upmanship seem pitiable and ridiculous. He has been incomparably generous to us!

Celebrate that it’s never too late to adopt hospitality as a way of life. You don’t need to be particularly talented or well-resourced. You can keep it simple, the way Jesus did, and you can simply declare, with every meal, that we’re one step closer to His return. Whatever we eat, whoever we are with, whichever topics of conversation come up, we can love those around us, remind them that there’s hope, and help meet their physical and spiritual needs. May we gratefully receive God’s hospitality, never taking it for granted and joyfully extending it to others.