The Right & Wrong Attitudes Of Hosting

Why do we host dinners in our homes?

Thanksgiving is coming up this month, and many of us will be opening our homes to cook and host for large groups of family or friends. Some of us look forward to these meals, while others come dragging their heels. But, of course, holidays are not the only time of year that people host, right? We invite our friends over on a regular basis, perhaps to grill or just to have drinks. We host playdates for our kids, church luncheons, baby showers and more.

There’s nothing wrong with opening your home for parties and other sorts of gatherings. In fact, we should. But it’s important to consider our motives for doing so. For, Jesus cares just as much about our attitude toward hospitality as the act itself.

Do we invite people over simply because “that’s just what you do” during the holidays, or perhaps because your community or culture expects you to? What is our attitude toward these sorts of meals? Do we ever invite people outside of our social circles to join or would that make things “too awkward” or “too stressful”?

The Parable of the Great Banquet

These are exactly the sorts of questions Jesus raises in his Parable of the Great Banquet in Luke 14:12–24. He goes to eat dinner at the home of a religious elite (“a ruler of the Pharisees”, v. 1), a man who is both wealthy and enjoys an elevated social status, and directly challenges the man about his guest list. This powerful man has only invited other powerful leaders to dine with him, and Jesus takes offense at this.

This scene does not lack for irony. As Craig L. Blomberg points out in Neither Poverty nor Riches: A Biblical Theology of Possessions, “Jesus has accepted an invitation to a Pharisaic banquet, so again we are reminded that he is not against enjoying a gourmet meal. Still, he uses this occasion to rebuke those who seek places of honor (14:8–11) and who invite only those who can invite them back (14:12–14).

Jesus has the audacity to tell his host, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be paid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”

Certainly, the point of Jesus’ words is not that we can never host meals with our family or friends. His emphasis, rather, is on rebuking “a culture where reciprocal responses of hospitality were deeply embedded in a sociology of shame and honor” (Blomberg 120). In other words, hospitality should never be used as a power play. It shouldn’t only be extended to people who can return the favor, thereby ensuring that hospitable acts benefit yourself. Instead, hospitality should be used to reach out to the powerless, to those outside of our socio-economic, cultural and ethnic backgrounds. It should be extended to those who cannot benefit us in return.

The Eternal Weight of True, Bible Hospitality

In fact, I would argue that if we use hospitality merely to benefit ourselves, it is not hospitality at all. This is another important lesson from Jesus’ parable: inviting your friends and people who will treat you lavishly in return is not hospitality; it’s entertainment.

Rosario Butterfield distinguishes between hospitality and entertainment this way in her book, The Gospel Comes With A House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post Christian World: “Entertainment is about impressing people and keeping them at arm’s length…Hospitality is about meeting the stranger and welcoming that stranger to become a neighbor—and then knowing that neighbor well enough that, if by God’s power he allows for this, that neighbor becomes part of the family of God through repentance and belief. It has absolutely nothing to do with entertainment.”

In using this definition, hospitality is a deeply spiritual act, in which our invitation to eat and drink is akin to offering the gospel, a deeper and more satisfying nourishment for our guests. In this sense, true, biblical hospitality has everything to do with Christ. It is not just a nice habit that appeases our moral inclinations. No, it is full of the weight of eternal value.

When we invite someone over, our desire should be to draw them into the deep experience of God’s hospitality. When we give someone our time, our energy and our love, we are making God’s hospitality felt in their lives. We offer them physical food and drink, while telling them of the true bread and the true water that always satisfies. This attitude makes hospitality gospel-centered and missional, and we should keep this attitude in mind every time a person enters our home.

What’s Your Attitude?

In the Parable of the Great Banquet, the Pharisees and other religious leaders of the day represent the “original guests” that the man invited to his great banquet (v. 16). Their refusal to come to this feast symbolizes their refusal to accept “both the message concerning the kingdom of God as well as the divinely chosen messenger. They wanted to obtain an invitation to fellowship with God and practice their discipleship on their own terms, at their own time, and in their own manner, and with whom they wished” (Wendland 165). In the end, the man rejects these elites, closing his door to them and offering his food to those more eager to come.

We can either use our homes, our meals and our gatherings to serve our own pleasures and purposes or we can host and be hospitable to advance the kingdom of God; we cannot do both.

When we read the Parable of the Great Banquet in Luke 14, we must ask ourselves, “Have we improved at all today in inviting “the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind” or their contemporary equivalents? How often do we invite the homeless or the disabled or the “abnormal” or the “awkward” to our gatherings? What attitude do we even have while thinking about that possibility right now?”

Let us strive to change the narrative, to be welcoming and hospitable to all, and to do so with an attitude of eagerness and gospel-expectancy, so that our deeds glorify God and not ourselves.