I Was a Stranger and You Welcomed Me

Today's Scripture

Matthew 25:35-36 — "For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me."

Matthew 25:40 — "And the King will answer them, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.'"

Hebrews 13:1-3 — "Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body."

The Big Idea

In his last teaching before the cross, Jesus says something staggering: he personally identifies with the stranger. Welcome the outsider, and you have welcomed him; shut the door, and you have shut it on him. This is not a metaphor he made up on the spot. It is who he is — the Son of God who came to earth as an unrecognized stranger, a refugee child, a man with nowhere to lay his head.

Reflection

The King in disguise

The parable of the sheep and the goats is the last public teaching Jesus gives in Matthew's Gospel. Days before his arrest, he describes the final judgment — and his checklist surprises everyone. The King separates people not by their religious résumés but by six concrete mercies: food, drink, welcome, clothing, care, visits. Right in the middle sits the one our political moment trips over: "I was a stranger and you welcomed me."

The Greek word for stranger is xenos — foreigner, outsider, the root of our word "xenophobia," the fear of foreigners. Jesus does not say the stranger reminded him of himself, or that he sympathized from a distance. He says: I was the xenos at your door.

Both groups in the parable are shocked. Matthew 25:44-45 — "Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger... and did not minister to you?' Then he will answer them, saying, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.'" Nobody recognized him. Which means the test was never recognition. The test was what they did when no one important seemed to be watching.

That detail should end a common excuse. We tell ourselves we would have welcomed Jesus — of course we would, with the hair and the halo from the paintings. But the parable says he does not arrive looking like the paintings. He arrives looking like the person whose case sounds complicated, whose paperwork is a mess, whose presence costs us something.

John Chrysostom — a fourth-century preacher whose nickname means "golden mouth" — refused to let his wealthy congregation dodge this:

"Do you wish to honor the body of Christ? Do not ignore him when he is naked. Do not pay him homage in the temple clad in silk, only then to neglect him outside where he is cold and ill-clad. He who said: 'This is my body' is the same who said: 'You saw me hungry and you gave me no food.'" — John Chrysostom, Homily 50 on the Gospel of Matthew

You cannot adore Christ at the altar and ignore him on the sidewalk. It is the same Christ. Chrysostom preached that to a wealthy capital city sixteen centuries ago, and it cost him his pulpit and eventually his life in exile. The parable has never been safe to take seriously.

Angels at the door

The early church took this so seriously that hospitality to strangers became one of its trademarks. Hebrews 13:1-3 commands believers not to neglect it, "for thereby some have entertained angels unawares" — a wink back at Abraham. Genesis 18:2 — "He lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing in front of him." Abraham ran to meet three anonymous travelers, washed their feet, and fed them his best calf — and discovered he was hosting the Lord himself.

The point is not that every stranger is secretly an angel. The point is that you cannot know in advance what God is doing in the person at your door — so the only safe policy is welcome. Notice, too, the verb in Hebrews 13:1-3: do not neglect hospitality. Neglect is not hatred. It is busyness, distraction, full calendars — the way most strangers actually get turned away. Nobody slams the door; we just never open it.

C.S. Lewis pushed it further. Forget angels; the human being in front of you is already sacred:

"Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses." — C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

The "Blessed Sacrament" is the bread and cup of Communion — the place Christians most expect to meet Christ. Lewis says the second holiest thing you will encounter today is a person. Any person. Jonathan Edwards, preaching on charity to the poor, made the bluntness of Scripture his argument:

"Where have we any command in the Bible laid down in stronger terms, and in a more peremptory urgent manner, than the command of giving to the poor?" — Jonathan Edwards, Christian Charity

"Peremptory" means non-negotiable — a command that ends the discussion. We treat care for the vulnerable as an elective. The Bible files it under obedience.

Picture the most ordinary version: a new family stands in your church lobby on Sunday, hovering near the welcome desk, kids tugging at sleeves, accents unfamiliar. Thirty seconds will decide what they believe about your church — and according to Jesus, those thirty seconds involve him personally. Mother Teresa, who spent her life among the dying poor of Calcutta, kept her theology of such moments to one sentence:

"Each one of them is Jesus in disguise." — Mother Teresa, In My Own Words

The Lord who was a refugee

Why does Jesus identify with the stranger so completely? Because it is autobiography.

He began his earthly life as a refugee. Matthew 2:13 — "Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him." The holy family bolted across a border at night because a ruler wanted their baby dead. That is the textbook definition of asylum-seeking. The Son of God knows what it is to be carried into a foreign country by parents running for his life.

His adult ministry was no more settled. Matthew 8:20 — "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." Homeless by choice, dependent on the hospitality of others, often unwelcome. And John states the cosmic version of it in one devastating line. John 1:11 — "He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him." The Maker of the world arrived at his own front door and was treated as a stranger.

Even resurrection did not change his disguise. On the first Easter, two heartbroken disciples trudged toward Emmaus. Luke 24:15-16 — "Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing him." They took him for an out-of-town nobody — and only knew him when he broke the bread they had shared with a stranger. It is hard to miss the hint. The risen Christ chose, as his first extended appearance, to be the unrecognized traveler who gets invited to dinner. He has not stopped showing up that way.

So when Jesus says "I was a stranger," he is not playacting solidarity. Dietrich Bonhoeffer — who left the safety of New York in 1939 to share his country's darkest hour, and died for it — knew that following this Christ means following him into costly places:

"When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

Welcoming strangers is rarely fatal for us. But it always costs something — time, comfort, reputation, the spare room. The parable assumes the cost; that is why the welcome counts as evidence at the judgment. Discipleship was never advertised otherwise, and a Christianity that never inconveniences itself for the xenos should reread the last sermon its Lord ever preached.

Welcomed first

Here is the gospel underneath the parable. Before Matthew 25 is a warning about our welcome, it is a window into his.

2 Corinthians 8:9 — "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich." The eternal Son emigrated. He left the wealth of heaven, crossed the border into our world, and took the lowest place in it — the manger, the road, the cross outside the city wall. Athanasius, the great fourth-century defender of the faith, dared to state the purpose:

"For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." — Athanasius, On the Incarnation

He did not mean we become deities. He meant the swap is real: the Son took our poverty and homelessness so that we could share his life, his riches, his place at the Father's table. The ultimate stranger-welcome has already happened, and we were the strangers.

That is why Martin Luther said a Christian's life relocates — out of self-protection and into Christ and the neighbor:

"A Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbour. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbour through love." — Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian

People who know they were welcomed at infinite cost do not calculate welcome stingily. The parable's sheep were not keeping score; they were just living out what grace had made them. When the King returns, may he find us at the door — because we finally learned who keeps showing up there.

Going Deeper

Hebrews 13:3 says to remember the mistreated "as though in prison with them" — empathy from the inside, not pity from a distance. Take ten minutes today and imagine one real journey: a parent waking a child at midnight to flee, the border line, the first day in a country whose language you cannot read. Then do one small, physical act of welcome this week — a meal invitation, a ride, a kind word to the newest person in the room. Do it as if it were him. According to Jesus, it is.