“God ‘stretched out His hands on the Cross, that He might embrace the ends of the world; for this Golgotha is the very center of the earth,’ wrote Cyril of Jerusalem around A.D. 347. His comment illustrates the fact that it is at the foot of the cross that we learn from God how hospitality is to function. The human practice of hospitality is, in the words of Reinhard Hütter, ‘both a reflection and an extension of God’s own hospitality — God’s sharing of the love of the triune life with those who are dust. At the very center of this hospitality stands both a death and a resurrection, the most fundamental enactment of truth from God’s side and precisely therefore also the threshold of God’s abundant hospitality.’ According to the Christian understanding of history, Christ’s death and resurrection constitute the ultimate expression of God’s hospitality and form the matrix for an understanding of all God’s actions and as such also the normative paradigm for human actions.
“In Cyril and Hütter’s understanding, God has embodied his hospitality on the cross. The well-known parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32) functions as an icon of this embodied hospitality. The parable, often accused of lacking in Christology, in reality presents us with our crucified Lord. It depicts God’s embracing welcome of sinners into his eternal home. Throughout the history of the Church, this parable has rightly functioned as a narrative description of God’s grace of forgiveness and renewal. The story captures for us the amazing interplay between divine grace and human freedom. Divine grace enters the picture in a number of ways: a father who unceremoniously runs up to his lost son to receive him back and who ignores his dignity as the paterfamilias must have a very special place for his son in his heart. A father who restores his prodigal son’s position as a member in the community (offering him the best robe), who grants him authority (giving him a ring to wear), and who gives him freedom (putting sandals on his feet) is someone who manifestly revels in the celebration of fellowship between father and child. The parable of the prodigal son is, therefore, equally the parable of the hospitable father.
“At the same time, God’s hospitality does not nullify human freedom. The father’s embrace does not force itself in tyrannical fashion on a son who has no choice but to endure the father’s imposition of his love. Hospitality rejects the violence of a totalizing imposition of oneself on the other, the violence that forces the other to be shaped into one’s own image. The father’s love, says Henri Nouwen in his commentary on Rembrandt’s painting of the prodigal son, ‘cannot force, constrain, push, or pull. It offers the freedom to reject that love or to love in return.’ A forced embrace would mean the loss of hospitality through the violence of the imposition of the host on the stranger. Even when we have lost our way and when our lives have come to an end, God’s hospitable grace requires that we enter voluntarily into his loving embrace.
‘With these introductory comments I am taking a distinctly Christian approach. Postmodern reflections on hospitality — those of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida in particular — tend to focus on one’s hospitality toward the other. This turn to the ethical and the religious in postmodern philosophy is fascinating and in many ways encouraging. We need to probe further, however, and look for a divine transcendent warrant of our human responsibility. Hospitality is not only or even primarily a human virtue, but it is a virtue that has a divine origin; it is a divine virtue. As a divine virtue, it gives expression to the very character of God. Already in the Old Testament, Israel’s hospitable treatment of others was to function as ‘a reflection of the hospitable heart of Yahweh.’ And particularly on the cross and in the resurrection, God has shown himself to be a God of hospitality.”
— from Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Baker Academic, 2004)