Homily for July 2, 2023 – 13th Sunday of Ordinary Time
One of the things I greatly enjoy about preparing to preach is rediscovering on a regular basis the fact that insight about the meaning of the readings we encounter each week in our liturgy can be found in unusual places. For instance, in preparing for this week’s homily I came across an article in the University of Detroit Mercy Law Review:
“Today hospitality is seen as a matter of etiquette, not ethics, a gracious welcome extended to dinner guests, or the patrons of a restaurant. But in the Bible hospitality is a basic virtue demanded of every disciple and community. Much more than courtesy to friends or clients, the biblical hospitality demanded by God in both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures requires that believers breach the walls separating them from needy strangers, welcoming the alien as an honored guest by offering food, shelter and protection, as well as companionship and service.”1
In our readings from the 2nd book of Kings and Matthew today we encounter two examples of this deeply rooted biblical call to hospitality written some 500 years apart from one another. In the first we encounter the unnamed “great” woman of Shunem. The translation we used today renders the Hebrew word gedolah or great as “wealthy.” Certainly her ability to add a room to her house to provide for the occasional visitor, Elisha, does suggest that she is a woman of some means. In a recent article2 however, Rabbi Gila Colman Ruskin notes that the word gedolah in this passage is the same word used to describe those who are wise in the ways of God. The greatness of the women of Shunem, she suggests, is less about her wealth than a wisdom born of great empathy for a wandering prophet and the generosity with which she provides him hospitality. God recognizes and rewards her great spirit by giving her a child.
Today’s Gospel reading is the conclusion of a lengthy narrative concerning Jesus’ sending the disciples out to preach and heal. In doing so he emphasizes that they are to do so relying entirely upon the hospitality of people in the communities they enter as pilgrims and strangers.
This is important. The biblical mandate for hospitality extended to the stranger among us is rooted in the memory that we have all been in their place. “You yourselves were once strangers in the land of Egypt” is a refrain regularly repeated throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus demands that his disciples experience dependence on the kindness of strangers as a way of continuing to infuse in all of us a resolute commitment to acts of hospitality as a central component of our faith. “Whoever gives even a cup of cold water…truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”
I think of all these things as we commemorate this week the 247th anniversary of the birth of our country. It is a year in which the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that more than 100 million people worldwide now live as refugees. Most barely subsist in conditions that are little different from prison camps. Hundreds of thousands are living in tents along our southern border with Mexico. Few have any hope that they will ever even be considered for resettlement of asylum. Nearly 11 million people live as undocumented persons in the US, with no path for obtaining legal status and living in constant fear that they will be deported, sometimes to countries in which they have never lived.
In pursuing cruel immigration and asylum policies that often treat refugees as criminals, we are a nation seem to have forgotten our own immigrant roots. AS Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and other people of faith within that nation, too many of us have forgotten or ignored the constant teachings across centuries within each of our traditions concerning the holiness of hospitality especially towards the aliens and the strangers among us.
This July 4th my prayer for my country is this prayer (slightly adapted) from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops:
Jesus, today you call us to welcome the members of God’s family who come to our land to escape oppression, poverty, persecution, violence, and war. Like your disciples, we too are filler with fear and doubt and even suspicion. We build barriers in our hearts and in our minds.
Jesus, help us by your grace,
- To banish fear from our hearts, that we may embrace each of your children as our own brother and sister,
- To welcome migrants and refugees with joy and generosity, while responding to their many needs;
- To realize that you call all people to your holy mountain to learn the ways of peace and justice;
- To share of our abundance as you spread a banquet before us;
- To give witness to your love for all people, as we celebrate the many gifts they bring.
We praise you and give you thanks for the family you have called together from so many people. We see in this human family a reflection of the divine unity of the Most Holy Trinity in whom we make our prayer: Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen.
1 U. Det. Mercy L. Rev. 857(2006)
2 https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/shunamite-woman/