Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 38:4 (Autumn 2024)
Article: Male Hospitality: The Bible Sets The Example
Author: Andrew B. Spurgeon

PP 38:4 (Autumn 2024) p. 14

Male Hospitality: The Bible Sets The Example

Andrew B. Spurgeon

Andrew B. Spurgeon is a professor of NT at Singapore Bible College. He is the Publications Secretary for the Asia Theological Association and the General Editor of the Asia Bible Commentary Series. His commentaries include 1 Corinthians, Romans, and James. He and his wife, Lori, reside in Singapore.

As an Indian, I grew up understanding hospitality to be important. We offered visitors water, coffee, or chai as they entered our home. If they came at lunch hour, we invited them to a meal. Hospitality was ingrained in me as a South Asian value. But my mother and sisters prepared the food, set the table, and washed the dishes. Without so many words, I was told that hospitality was not a male’s task. I was not invited into the kitchen, and I ate with the guests, unlike my mother and sisters, who served us. This pattern changed when I became a Christian and realized hospitality is as much a male virtue as a female one. When we have unexpected guests, I am the one who fixes supper, since I can cook up quick dishes. When meals are pre-planned, my wife cooks, and I wash dishes.

Hospitality, however, is more than fixing dinners. Among other things, it is about welcoming people, showing them around a city, making them feel comfortable in their new environment, visiting prisoners, caring for migrant workers, taking care of people’s emotional needs, helping people with language acquisition, appreciating people with disabilities, helping undocumented migrants, caring for the poor. The two Greek words that best describe hospitality are philoxenia and xenodocheō.1 The first is a combination of “love” (philos) and “stranger” (xenos), and the second is a combination of “stranger” (xenos) and “receive” (docheō). Hospitality is “a love for the stranger” which leads us to “receiving them” into our home.2 Often, people assume hospitality is a friendship extended to someone they know or are acquainted with. But genuine hospitality is a friendship we extend to someone we do not know, such as a traveler, migrant, refugee, or someone who is homeless or socially awkward. It is giving people a safe space where they can be who they are without being afraid. Henri Nouwen writes,

The paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create emptiness, not a fearful emptiness, but a friendly emptiness where strangers can enter and discover themselves as created free; free to sing their own songs, speak their own languages, and dance their own dances; free also to leave and follow their own vocations. Hospitality is not a sub...