The best analysis I have heard of the scandalous mistreatment yesterday of President Zelensky by President Trump and Vice President Vance is that brief video posted by Timothy Snyder later in the afternoon. If you have not heard it, you should stop reading this and listen to it right now: https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/five-failures-in-the-oval-office?r=2xpn00&utm_medium=ios.
Of the five failures that Prof. Snyder points out in the Trump-Vance shamefest, number 1 is: failure of hospitality.
To me this is an indication that Prof. Snyder has a biblically formed conscience. Because hospitality—ξενοδοχία or φιλοξενία—is a value and virtue that is deeply embedded in the New Testament. In English it is usually represented by “hospitality”—but using that word does not help us speakers of contemporary English grasp the meaning of ξενοδοχία or φιλοξενία. (After this I’ll transliterate: xenodochia and philoxenia.)
When we hear “hospitality” we are likely to think of a couple of things. We might think of the “hospitality industry,” which is of course a for-profit industry. It is a legitimate industry. I am grateful for good hotels and restaurants and do not mind paying them. But the transaction between a paying “guest” and a profiting “host” has nothing to do with xenophilia or xenodochia.
Or we think of the hosting of friends or visitors who may well be expected to return the favor, or of social gatherings of various sorts. Here we are getting closer to xenodochia, but we are not quite there yet. These forms of hospitality can be polite and even generous. Then again, they may be perfunctory: hospitality shown because societal conventions require it.
Even on this level, the Trump-Musk debacle was a gross failure in hospitality. There are expectations as to how a head of state will treat a visiting head of state. If we want to talk about social norms, Trump’s and Vance’s performance today was a failure on the level of, say, belching in a guest’s face, or peeing in the punch bowl. Not using the wrong fork. Not just a failure but a grotesque and shocking failure.
But conventional hospitality in the ordinary sense is shown to those with whom one is familiar: friends, equals, colleagues. Perhaps we invite them to a meal. But if we don’t, they won’t go hungry; they will eat somewhere else. If we don’t invite them to stay in our house, they won’t sleep out in the cold or under a bridge. And whatever kindness we show them, they are likely to return. My first teacher of classical Greek [46 years ago!?] told us that in some Greek texts we should read xenos as “guest-friend”—a person whom you host when they visit here, and who may host you when you visit there. So in some Greek literature, hospitality is seen as a sphere which reciprocity may operate. Even in the New Testament, one instance of xenos (referencing Gaius in Romans 16:23) has to be translated “friend” or the like, because Gaius seems morely likely to be someone who hosted Paul than somone whom Paul hosted.
Encoded in the meaning of Greek xenodochia is this: the one to whom one provides lodging and food is xenos: strange, foreign, not from here, not one of us, and therefore at a disadvantage, vulnerable. This is the usual biblical sense, inherited from Hebrew gēr in Old Testament texts. If we don’t feed them, they might go hungry. If we don’t lodge them, they might lack shelter, they night not be safe. The -dochia in xenodochia (and –docheō in the related verb xenodocheō) has to do with receptiveness. A place other than one’s own home where strangers are received and sheltered may be a xenodocheia. Another related verb, xenodokeō, with kappa rather than chi, would seem to indicate esteeming the stranger, regarding the stranger highly.
Xenodochia, philoxenia, and related verbs and adjectives are not as common in the New Testament as love, kindness, goodness, and other general terms for related virtues. Philoxenia is a word not for love or kindness or generosity in the abstract but for these things in the concrete.
People who dip in and out of cheap-grace churches that tell them all they have to do is believe in Jesus without taking them into the depths of what biblical πίστις is (hint: “belief” doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface meaning of pistis, pisteuō, and pistos) might not understand that belief and love in the abstract are worth precisely nothing. These churches teach from lightweight gospels that don’t include Matthew 25, and lightweight New Testaments that don’t include the Epistle of James, and lightweight Bibles that omit all the Pentateuchal passages requiring care for the stranger, the foreigner, the one who doesn’t belong here but is here anyway and whose presence here requires us to exercise philoxenia toward them if we wish to continue ourselves to dwell in the philoxenia of God.
I said above that hospitality is deeply embedded in the New Testament. It does not ride on the surface, it does not appear, superficially, to be as important as ideas like Christ, healing, salvation, faith/faithfulness, cross, atonement, resurrection. But, as practical theologian Christine Pohl has helped many of us realize, it deeply embedded in all of these and expresses their aim. It is the semisecret name for the stance of the God who yearns for the return of the fickle progeny and runs out to meet them, rejoicing, with arms open wide. This—the heart of God the Redeemer and Savior—is philoxenia. It is God’s basic attitude. It is the core of the gospel. And God wants to see it formed imitatively in all of God’s children.
This is why Jesus gives his stark warning in Matthew 25. When Jesus warns about the coming division of the sheep from the goats, saying that the sheep fed and clothed him when he was hungry and naked, and the goats ignored him, he does not even imagine a third sort of beast that tried to shake him down.
For any interested in a closer look at New Testament texts: In the New Testament, the noun xenodochia does not appear. The verb xenodocheō is used in 1 Timothy 5:10, where having shown hospitality (εἰ ἐξενοδόχησεν) is qualification for enrollment in the list of widows who will be supported by the community.
The noun used in the NT is philoxenia, love of strangers, which appears in Romans 12:13 and in Hebrew 13:2. In the latter passage, philadelphia (love of one’s own brothers and sisters, i.e., members of one’s own family or one’s own community) is paired with philoxenia (love of strangers). The latter is recommended with the famous, enigmatic notice that some who have exercised philoxenia have thereby, without knowing it, entertained (shown hospitality to; the verb here is xenizō) angels. We know our siblings, fellow church members, and familiar friends are no angels! But that foreigner—the needy person from elsewhere, or from nowhere, perhaps with no property, probably with no rights, perhaps with no legal status—the apostle suggests we should not feel too sure that they are not direct emissaries of the God on whom we ourselves confess that we depend for undeserved welcome and salvation, the strong implication being that they might well report back to God as to how we treated them.
The related adjective philoxenos occurs 1 Timothy 3:2 and in Titus 1:8, in a list of qualifications for the overseer / episkopos / bishop; think of Bishop Myriel in Les Misérables, perhaps the most archtypal Christian bishop in all of literature, who is also called Monsieur Bienvenu: Mr. Welcome, or Mr. Hospitality, a model of compassion and mercy. So, recalling the passage noted above in 1 Timothy 5: the scriptures teach that the insider who has not been accustomed to provide a warm welcome—food, shelter, and whatever else is needed—to the outsider, to the foreigner, is qualified neither to lead the community, nor to administer nor to receive the material aid that the godly of community will of course dole out as as integral function of its existence as a fellowship of Christ-followers.
These NT statements of requirements for leadership in the Christian community are of course not the standards according to which secular government leaders were chosen in the Greco-Roman world of the NT. But many Trumpists would be surprised to learn that Greco-Roman treatises on government, and imperial ideology in particular, emphasized qualities like philanthropy, patience, mercifulness. The leaders held up for admiration in Greek and Roman treatises patiently tolerated even vicious denunciation by the lowest of low-lifes. Moral “pagan” Greco-Romans saw a deranged and capriciously malicious tyrant like Nero or Caligula as a horrible aberration from the ideal. Even ordinary vindictiveness did not earn their praise. They did not, like our contemporary Trumpists, either embrace or excuse vicious character in their leaders.
There is a another Greek-derived word for Christians who are willing to promote for leadership in the political arena a scoundrel and cad whom everyday pagan Greeks and Romans in the ancient world would have rejected as unfit: hypocrite. “We aren’t electing a Sunday School superintendent” (or, in the words of the not-so-reverend Robert Jeffress, “I want the meanest, toughest son of a bitch I can find”) to excuse voting for a degenerate and seditious scoundrel is the plainest confession of hypocrisy ever made. Christians, surely more than ancient Greeks and Romans, when given the opportunity to choose the leaders of the secular governments, will prefer candidates who copiously exhibit the virtue of philoxenia. I don’t know what these people are who prefer the meanest SOB they can find; “Christian” is evidently not the right label for that attitude.
One of the first things a person with a biblically formed conscience will look for, and note when missing, in a leader either within the church or in the state, is philoxenia. From a biblical, Christian point of view, a failure of hospitality might be the gravest possible failure.
Verba Sparsa 