Hospitality in the Bible is always fruitful. The Shunnamite welcomes Elisha and gives birth to a son: “Next year, in the same season, you will hold a son in your arms”. The same thing had happened to Abraham and Sarah: after hosting the three mysterious characters in their tent, the two, despite being old and Sarah being barren, conceive Isaac. “‘Making room’ opens Abraham out to the possibility of a” new “life, precisely because it is not foreseeable and unexpected. The episode with the oaks of Mamre suggests to the people of Israel and to every reader of the text that the key to any possible generativity is hospitality “(Stefano Bittasi). Jesus deepens this perspective in the Gospel by declaring: “whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me”. Through hospitality we even come to welcome God himself, who is the author of every life. The reward we receive is not simply in the logic of the exchange, it is deeper: by welcoming the Lord we welcome his generativity and our life becomes fruitful, participating in that paschal dynamism that Saint Paul recalls to the Romans. Making room for the other that we welcome, we die a little to ourselves, we die in Christ, so that, “if we died with Christ, we also believe that we will live with him”.

Commentary by Comunità di Dumenza

Translation by f. Mark Hargreaves, Prinknash Abbey