Day 4 of 7
I Was a Stranger and You Welcomed Me
Jesus identifies with the outsider
Scripture Readings
Today's Reading
Read Matthew 25:31-46 in full. Focus especially on verses 35-36 and 43-45: "'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'... 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.'"
Then read 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."
Reflection
The parable of the sheep and the goats is one of the most sobering passages in the Gospels. It is Jesus' final teaching before his arrest and crucifixion — the last public word of the Son of God before the cross. And its subject is not doctrine, not worship, not church governance. Its subject is how we treat the vulnerable.
The structure of the parable is devastatingly simple. The King separates the nations into two groups. To one group he says: you fed me, clothed me, visited me, welcomed me. To the other he says: you did not. Both groups are astonished. Neither recognized Jesus in the people they helped or ignored. And this is precisely the point. The test was not whether they recognized Jesus in the stranger. The test was whether they cared for the stranger regardless.
The word "stranger" (xenos in Greek) is the same root from which we get "xenophobia." The xenos is the foreigner, the alien, the one who does not belong. And Jesus says, flatly: I was that person. When you welcomed the foreigner, you welcomed me. When you turned the foreigner away, you turned me away.
Tim Keller insisted that this is not metaphorical: "Jesus takes the stranger's place. To welcome or reject the stranger is to welcome or reject Jesus. This is not a metaphor. It is the deepest reality of the gospel." For Keller, the parable reveals something about the very nature of Christ: he identifies downward, with the powerless, the displaced, the unwelcome. If we want to find Jesus, we must look not only in churches and worship services but in refugee camps, immigration detention centers, and the faces of frightened families who have traveled thousands of miles with nothing.
Hebrews 13 adds another dimension. "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares." The author alludes to Abraham's hospitality in Genesis 18, where three visitors turn out to be divine messengers. The point is not that every stranger might secretly be an angel. The point is that you never know what God is doing through the encounters you have with people you do not yet know.
Bonhoeffer understood the cost of this identification. Following Christ means following him into solidarity with the outcast: "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." For Bonhoeffer, this was not rhetoric. It was biography. He left the safety of America to return to Nazi Germany, ultimately giving his life in resistance to a regime that had decided certain people were not worth welcoming, not worth protecting, not worth keeping alive.
The parable does not prescribe immigration policy. It does not tell us how many refugees a nation should accept or what the legal process should look like. But it does something more radical: it tells us that our eternal destiny is connected to how we treat the stranger. Not what we think about the stranger. Not what policies we support regarding the stranger. But what we actually do when the stranger stands before us.
This should unsettle Christians on both sides of the political aisle. The conservative who supports strict immigration enforcement must reckon with the fact that Jesus identifies with the person being turned away. The progressive who advocates for open borders must reckon with whether advocacy has become a substitute for personal action — whether they have outsourced compassion to government while personally avoiding the messy, costly work of welcoming an actual stranger into their actual life.
Going Deeper
Hebrews says to remember the imprisoned "as though in prison with them." This is radical empathy — not pity from a distance but imaginative solidarity. Can you practice this today? Choose one group of vulnerable people — refugees, detainees, asylum seekers — and spend ten minutes trying to imagine their experience from the inside. Then ask: what does Jesus require of me?
Key Quotes
“Jesus takes the stranger's place. To welcome or reject the stranger is to welcome or reject Jesus. This is not a metaphor. It is the deepest reality of the gospel.”
“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow him, or it may be a death like Luther's, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world.”
Prayer Focus
Ask Jesus to help you see his face in the stranger — not as a pious exercise but as the terrifying reality of Matthew 25, where eternal destinies hinge on how we treat the vulnerable.
Meditation
In the parable of the sheep and goats, people are judged not by their theology but by their treatment of the hungry, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned, and the stranger. Does this frighten you, comfort you, or both?
Question for Discussion
Jesus says that when we welcome a stranger, we welcome him, and when we refuse, we refuse him. How literally should we take this identification — and what are the practical consequences if we take it fully seriously?