Last month a homeless man pleaded guilty to two charges of dishonestly making a false representation after booking in for three nights at a £70-per-night hotel and pretending to be Louis Theroux, a BBC presenter. The hotel staff became suspicious on the second night when he ordered room service including ‘some fags’ rather than ‘cigarettes’. This was a modern version in reverse of old tales about kings visiting their subjects in disguise, generously rewarding those who were hospitable. This time ‘a peasant’ pretended to be ‘a king’ and rewarded himself at the hotel’s expense.
The story of Abraham in today’s first reading seems to be a biblical version of those old, classical tales, as God comes to visit him in the guise of three passing travellers. The patriarch offers them some rest and meal in the shadow of trees near to where he was living. At the end of that meal Abraham gets promised by his visitors that next year he and his wife will have a son, and that in this son their greatest desire and dream will come true. A rather similar event takes place in today’s gospel, when Jesus comes to the house of three siblings: Mary, Martha and Lazarus. In this story the reward is different, because the very presence of Jesus is the gratification for their hospitality. The reward is somehow missed by Martha, who is bustling around making a meal, her irritation growing as her sister seems to neglect her duties by sitting and listening to the guest.
Besides that classic meaning, there’s another interesting aspect to the hospitality shown by Abraham and by the three siblings. On both occasions the hosts meet God hidden in their everyday hustle and bustle. Those two events are in contrast with the usually bombastic, massively exaggerated and spectacularly miraculous acts of God, filling the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. Those stories, taken literally over the centuries, have led to similarly spectacular but tragically fatal disasters, when people’s honesty and righteousness were tried by fire, or by immersion in water, and so forth. All medieval descriptions of exceptional miracles attributed to saints must be taken with a pinch of salt.
That desire for spectacular events is still alive; recently there was huge Mass with a healing service held in the National Stadium in Warsaw. It attracted sixty thousand people, many of them expecting healing of their illnesses. This week, mostly young people from around the world will be celebrating the World Youth Day in Rio with Pope Francis. There’s nothing wrong with those big events as long as they lead to, and keep alive, that very personal, intimate relationship with God. The real challenge is to find God in events, places and times when seemingly he is absent, when his presence is all but obvious. The real challenge is to follow Jesus without instant gratification, or when the only reward is his presence. But finding God in our everyday hustle and bustle has one major advantage over any emotional, short-lived buzz: it provides long-lasting unwavering support from the One who became one of us.