#2 - Mamre and Sodom paired
The model of hospitality set at Mamre illuminates events at Sodom, and later at the Cenacle in Jerusalem. The point: hospitality is at the heart of the Gospel.
The first book of the Bible is Genesis, and a quarter of that book is about Abraham. In a dozen chapters or so, we learn how God taught Abraham, tutored him one-on-one about faith and family life and violence and sex (Abraham flunked chastity 101) – and about hospitality. Two chapters on hospitality.
Chapter 18, the model of hospitality at Mamre, is upbeat, despite storms on the horizon. The next chapter, with its sharp contrast between hospitality and its polar opposite in Sodom, is grim, despite the silver lining.
Chapter 19 opens with Lot welcoming the two angels who had been just left God at Mamre and walked to Sodom. Lot bows, provides a place to rest, offers bread, arranges a feast promptly (menu not recorded), and talks business afterwards. The pattern of hospitality set at Mamre is followed in detail in Sodom. However, the business at hand is the problems in Sodom. And these problems arrive, up close and personal: the town turns out to demand that Lot turn over his guests, for an evening of homosexual gang rape. How can I degrade thee? Let me count the ways.
Lot refuses, and offers his daughters instead. The townspeople mutter racist remarks at Lot, and start shoving. Then the angels take charge, evacuate the innocent – all three or four of them – and then destroy everything in sight.
Not long after all the hellfire, Lot’s daughters seduce dad and have children, so Lot becomes a patriarchal figure – the father of two nations, just like Uncle Abe. So the story of hospitality in Sodom matches the story in Mamre in that detail too. But the fire and brimstone interlude dominates the story. Abraham and Lot were hospitable to strangers, and were rewarded beyond expectation or even imagination. Lot’s neighbors were not hospitable, and were punished beyond expectation or even imagination.
It’s a struggle to focus successfully on what the townsfolk did that was so wrong. The word “sodomy” was coined to describe the problem in Sodom, but that word and that view of the matter did not emerge until 14 centuries later. Homosexuality doesn’t look good in the Bible, but there were other issues in Sodom. For one thing, the proposed sex was nonconsensual, attempted rape. For another thing, it was gang rape. But much more importantly, the prophets who referred to the crimes of Sodom did not make any mention of homosexuality: Isaiah spoke of Sodom’s luxury in the midst of need, Jeremiah criticized their injustice, and Ezekiel denounced their pride and their callous disregard of the poor. And surely, if the story unfolds in contrast to the hospitality modeled by Abraham and imitated by Lot, we cannot overlook their mistreatment of guests. Abraham and Lot were rewarded for hospitality, and the people of Sodom were punished for inhospitality.
Guests should be welcomed and treated as if they are celestial. The opposite of that is treating them as objects to be used for pleasure. Homosexual gang rape is not a silly sideshow, but it’s not the heart of the matter either. The two chapters are about hospitality, and the destruction of Sodom is about the punishment for inhospitality.
But isn’t there a neutral ground between good and evil? Can’t you ignore guests, and neither bow to them nor bend over them? Can you just walk away, and neither feed them nor mistreat them?
It seems not. The arrival of a complex creature in our midst will elicit a response – for good or for evil.