“I had crossed the line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land.” Harriet Tubman

The feature common to the service of the virtuous and the neglect of the wicked in the general judgment of Matthew 25, is that they both discover to their surprise that the form assumed by the Lord in the world is that of a stranger.  The surprise of the wicked is more poignant.

“But when, Lord, did we see you..,” they cry, the implication being: if we had known that you were that person, how could we have passed you by? But all they saw was someone in need. The Lord was there incognito.

In ancient culture generally, the stranger was not someone against whom you placed yourself instinctively on guard. The stranger was someone to be specially welcomed. In the New Testament such hospitality is recommended to believers on the ground that strangers were often angels in disguise (Hebrews 13:2).

In Matthew 25, of course, the angel in disguise is the Lord. And the “disguise” embraces the character of the incarnation itself. The identification between the Lord and “the least of the brethren,” as Karl Rahner once pointed out, is not simply a moral one.

The Lord does not say: “In so far as you did it to the least of these, it was as if you were doing it to me.” The identification is much stricter than that. He says plainly: “You were doing it to me!” He and “the least” are practically one at the level of being.

Hospitality to strangers was also biblically mandated for another reason. The Israelites should know how strangers feel, they were told, because they themselves were once strangers in a foreign land (Leviticus 19:34). But ancient hospitality went even further than this “feeling for” the stranger.

The latter came directly under the protection of the gods. Thus, a stranger lost in the night could be invited into a home, fed, offered wine, and only after he or she was feeling at home be asked to tell his or her name.

After they were thus welcomed, seeing strangers safely on their way was hospitality’s last act.  From this perspective, the “good” Samaritan was, in a perhaps more relevant sense, not only a good but a hospitable Samaritan.

In the West hospitality was given special prominence in the Rule of St Benedict. Guests should be received, Benedict wrote, “as Christ Himself.” They were to be met with due courtesy by the abbot or his deputy, and during their stay they were to be under the special protection of a monk appointed for the purpose.

Benedict saw the monastery as a “school for love” -- love that permeated the community and extended to the many guests and strangers who found temporary refuge, or retreat, within its walls.

The open-heartedness of Benedict’s welcome was also reflected in the Sufism of the Islamic philosopher Rumi: “Come, come whoever you are…Though you’ve broken your vows a thousand times, come yet again, come.”

Benedict and Rumi are like oases in the sparse Western tradition of hospitality. Hospitality has never otherwise had the depth of ethical and spiritual meaning it enjoyed in ancient culture.

Today, in fact, the word has migrated from older associations to include etiquette, Martha Stewart, talk shows, even “the hospitality services industry,” as this relates to the entertainment and tourism business.

A salient addition to our understanding of the stranger to be welcomed was made by the modern psychologist Carl Jung. Jung pointed out that there was also a stranger within who needed welcome, not just the traditional stranger on the outside.

An encounter with a stranger was an opportunity to encounter the shadow aspects of oneself – those parts of the self that become estranged from our conscious minds, the parts we tend to deny. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung described a meeting he had with Pueblo Indians in New Mexico.

The chief remarked to Jung on the appearances of white people. “Their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed and distorted by folds. Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always seeking something. What are they seeking?

The whites always want something; they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think they are mad.”

Jung asked the chief why he thought whites were mad. The chief replied, “They say they think with their heads.” Jung’s surprised reply was, “Why of course! What do you think with?” To which the chief replied, “We think here,” indicating his heart.

“For the first time in my life,” Jung later wrote, “someone had drawn for me a picture of the real white man. This chief had struck our vulnerable spot, unveiled a truth to which we are blind. I felt rising within me like a shapeless mist something unknown and yet deeply familiar.”

Jung had discovered in himself two strangers, first, the “head thinker,” product of European culture, conditioned in a way that left him estranged from “heart thinking.”

The mist he felt rising within was the awareness that it was  “head thinking” that lay behind atrocities from Roman conquests, to forced conversion, down to colonisation and the conquistadors, who imposed dominion upon peaceful peoples like New Mexico’s Pueblos.

The second stranger, another shadow aspect of himself, was the “heart thinker,” the secret part of himself that longed for integration, for the wholeness of heart and head.

Whether one looks at hospitality from the perspective of welcoming the stranger within or the stranger without, the birth of spiritual possibility stems from the same initiative. One has to open oneself to and not fear the encounter.

Helping an outsider to come inside – and doing it well – has the capacity to transform our lives by expanding them and making greater integration possible within them. We set ourselves on a path of greater wholeness and more abundant spiritual health.