"Let brotherly love continue. 2 Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some have unwittingly
entertained angels."1 - Hebrews 13:1-1
“Because we too are human beings, God makes it possible for us to empathize with others who might be enduring hardship”. - Empathy is/should be one of the key component involved in hospitality. Empathy has been defined by Webster as "the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it. It is, it claims, the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner and extends to the capacity for for actually acting on this feeling. It comes from the Greek “empatheia”, literally, a passion, from “empathēs” emotional, from em- + pathos feelings, emotion — more at pathos. It first appeared in the English language about 1850 or so which is not say that this was the first time that the emotion appeared in the English speaking people!
It is interesting that Hospitality is a universally observed thing in human experience. It is not a mater that is seen only within the Christian community. All religious traditions emphasize hospitality. Even the irreligious recognize the need for empathy and taking in and caring for the stranger and for the needy. This is not a Christian thing. The Christian part of the matter is not in the doing of the deed, but in the why of the doing!
The example the writer to Hebrews builds on the concept cited in verse 1, that of brotherly love continuing...Verse three takes it even further when it extends the idea to prisoners. The "prisoners" in view are not those in prison for crimes against humanity, but those in prison for their faith. They are those being persecuted, as is made clear in the text. This is not to say that we ought not be knd to thsose in prison because of criminal activity, but this text does not commission that activity.
“To obtain money to free a fellow believer, some early Christians even sold themselves into slavery.” - The social circumstances were very, very different at the time being addressed in this letter than they are now and we must recognize and acknowledge that as we read it. It is foolish to try and "reimagine" or reinterpret this text and bring the actual meaning of the text forward to modern circumstances to try and understand it. Doing so bends it completely out of shape and makes it absolutely un-understandable. The result will be that end up with some abomination that little resembles what God intended and communicated to the writer of Hebrews.
Sadly, that is what we see in much of the church today. In our rush to make the Scripture "relevant" to modern audiences, we have forgotten the difference between interpretation and application. In our rush to seen attractive to those around us and gather an audience, building and not driving away, we have so obscured the meaning of the Bible, and the process by we obtain that meaning, that we can make it mean virtually anything we wish. Obviously, that makes man the authority and not God in the matter of "revelation" these days - a contradiction of the gravest sorts and sadly one that will be discovered in lives of man until the stand before their Creator at the last day!
The "freedom" here is freedom from chains of persecution, not for some crime committed. The suffering was the suffering of persecution at the hands of the government, "official" persecutors. We are, it seems, drawing closer and closer to that kind of persecution today as those in authority express their distaste for faith more and more openly.
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[1] This year I am often using MacArthur’s devotional “Strength for Today” as a starting point for my comments. Quotes from MacArthur’s Devotional are in boldface.
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