One of the most exasperating bits of exegetical trendiness to afflict First World Catholics for the past thirty years or so has been the endless recirculation, like that of a bad penny, of the “True Meaning of the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes” homily. It goes like this:
Jesus found himself in the wilderness with a crowd of five thousand people who were two millennia stupider than we smart suburban Americans. When people started getting hungry, Jesus took five loaves and two fishes and gave them to a couple of people around him. Suddenly, inspired by a wave of warm fuzziness emanating from this gesture, everybody remembered the picnic baskets they had tucked away in the folds of their robes and started sharing their lunches. People were so moved by this utterly unprecedented outburst of mutual generosity that they called it the “miracle” of the loaves and fishes. So we should also likewise share our lunches. The End.
It’s a story that only suburban Americans could possibly believe. As a Palestinian friend of mine once said, “My father would sooner see our family starve to death than that a guest should go without food.” That’s a sentiment found almost universally in the hospitality of the Near East, and it has roots that go back to remotest antiquity. The notion that Jesus “inspired” ancient Semites to share their food in the miracle of the loaves and fishes is as preposterous as the notion that he “inspired” them to walk on two legs or breathe air for the first time in their history. It’s balderdash. Hospitality was one of the sacred duties universally recognized by everybody in the crowd that day.
Indeed, the Old Testament is full of testimony to the ancient Jewish conviction that care for guests was crucial. Abraham, for instance, is marked by his sense of hospitality, most notably when the three visitors arrive to promise the birth of Isaac and to warn of the destruction of Sodom (see Genesis 18). Scripture constantly emphasizes Israel’s duty of hospitality to the alien, the orphan, and the widow (see, for example, Deuteronomy 10:18 and Leviticus 19:34). The book of Ruth centers on the duty to take in strangers—and it becomes a book of the Bible because out of this drama issues Israel’s greatest king, David, a descendent of Ruth.
David’s story, of course, ultimately issues in the birth of the Son of David, Jesus. Yet the paradox of Jesus’ birth is that “his own received him not” (John 1:11, KJV). He was shunted off to a stable to be born. He lived the life of an itinerant preacher with nowhere to lay his head. His few moments with a roof over his head were unusual, and those who (such as Mary of Bethany) provided him with hospitality are remembered for it. He died despised and rejected of men, and even his burial place had to be borrowed since he had none of his own.
This is the backdrop for the Christian understanding of the tradition of hospitality—a tradition that both ennobles and bedevils us. It’s the source of that great Christian invention, the “hospital” (note the etymology of the word) and of the current chaos in our country concerning illegal immigration. It’s why we give to homeless shelters and why we feel so baffled and conflicted by the homeless when we meet them. Do we tell them, “If any one will not work, let him not eat,” as did St. Paul (2 Thessalonians 3:10), or take them in, as Mother Teresa would do?
The Church, as is her custom, does not offer us a program for harboring the harborless any more than she writes us a recipe book to buttress her command to feed the hungry. It’s pretty much up to us how we are to live out the ideal. So, for instance, some people start— and many people support—homeless shelters, shelters for runaways, shelters for battered women and drug addicts, and so forth. Others (with more courage than most of us, including me) take homeless people into their homes. This is radical charity. It is also quite dangerous, as a woman I know discovered when her grateful guests fled the premises with her wallet and embarked on a campaign of identity theft that has yet to reach its end.
This brings us to a point many well-meaning people discover in painful ways: Just because somebody is a victim doesn’t mean they can’t be bad too. Hitler, after all, was homeless once. It’s easy, in the flush of excitement over conversion, to leap into a Franciscan zeal for the homeless, only to discover that the homeless guy you want to help is homeless not because he’s one of the wretched of the earth to whom fate dealt a bad hand but because he’s a violent, unstable parasite who bites the hand that feeds him. Sometimes the bum suffers not from bum luck but from sitting on his sinful bum. Sometimes it really is better to let professionals handle things than to assume that your sanctity will melt the heart of the guy who, unbeknownst to you, is wanted for rape in three states.
Of which more next time.
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
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