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When I first picked up Making Room, I imagined I would be reading about inviting people over for dinner or making sure your son's girlfriend feels welcome when she comes to visit. But Christine Pohl is concerned with the poor. I may envision potlucks when I think of hospitality, but Pohl means welcoming strangers. Christians today, she says bluntly, by and large are inhospitable: "today most understandings of hospitality have a minimal moral component—hospitality is a nice extra if we have the time or resources, but we rarely view it as a spiritual obligation or as a dynamic expression of vibrant Christianity."
Pohl demonstrates that hospitality is obligatory, "basic to who we are as followers of Jesus." It can be uncomfortable to show kindness to strangers, but Jesus did it, and so should we. The Bible, argues Pohl, requires the people of God to be hospitable. Hospitality first comes up in Genesis 18, with Abraham and Sarah welcoming three guests who prove to be angels. The passage, Pohl observes, is "unambiguously positive about welcoming strangers. It connects hospitality with the presence of God, with promise, and with blessing." In Kings, Elisha and Elijah are both taken in by women who do not know them; the "guests brought their hosts into special connection with God," and the hosts usually received more mundane re wards as well. In contrast, when Old Testament figures are intentionally inhospitable—consider the men of Sodom in Genesis 19 and Gibeah in Judges 19—they are destroyed.
Indeed, Pohl suggests that hospitality is integral to the overarching "grand narrative" of Israel's history: "Embedded within the covenant between God and Israel was Israel's identity as an alien and its related responsibility to sojourners and strangers." In turn, the New Testament both builds upon and transforms earlier teachings about hospitality: "Jesus gave his life so that persons could be welcomed into the Kingdom and in doing so linked hospitality, grace, and sacrifice in the deepest and most personal way imaginable." And the epistles are filled with reminders: Romans 12 and 15 urge believers to practice hospitality; Hebrews 13 instructs us not to neglect hospitality; 1 Peter 4 notes that hospitality should be offered ungrudgingly.
Pohl is no Pollyanna. Welcoming strangers, she writes in a section called "'Risky' Strangers and Worried Hosts," can be anxiety-producing and even dangerous. What if you invite someone into your home and he never leaves? Or molests your child? Or steals your silver? Worried hosts, Pohl says, have often looked back to bygone days when communities were safer, strangers more trustworthy, and hospitality easier. It was well and good for our great-grandparents to open their homes to a stranger in need, we say, but for us it would be unthinkable.
Such rationalizing, Pohl shows, has a long history. Martin Luther thought that the patriarchs of the Hebrew Bible had an easier time opening their door to strangers than did Luther's contemporaries because "there was not such a large number of vagabonds and scoundrels in the world as there is to day." Calvin wrote, "At [Abraham's] time, there was greater honesty than is, at present, to be found among the prevailing perfidy of man kind; so the right of hospitality might be exercised with less danger."
Pohl acknowledges that hospitality might actually have been easier for Abraham and Great-Grandma—but not because guests were more honest in the good ol' days. If anyone is to blame for hospitality's difficulties today, it is the hosts. In the past, hospitality
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