Hebrews 13:2 · Passage · Hospitality
Entertaining Angels Unaware
The passage opens the last chapter of Hebrews, after the warning of chapter 12 that God is a consuming fire, and turns the letter to the daily conduct of the church.
John Calvin held that the strangers of Hebrews 13:2 were chiefly the needy of the readers' own day, believers who had left their homes for the name of Christ.
Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.
- The passage
- Hebrews 13:1 to 3
- Book
- Hebrews
- Hold in memory
- Hebrews 13:2
Summary
The first readers of Hebrews had once stood by prisoners and lost their property for their faith, and the writer asks them to keep that love alive while their hardship went on. He gives the welcome of strangers a reason from the history of God's people and sets it between love for fellow believers and care for prisoners.
- Hebrews 13:1 to 3 gives three commands in a row: continue in brotherly love, do not neglect hospitality to strangers, and remember prisoners and the mistreated.
- The reason for hospitality is that some hosts entertained angels without knowing it, and John Calvin, Adam Clarke and Albert Barnes name Abraham at Mamre and Lot at Sodom as those hosts.
- Philoxenia, the Greek word for hospitality, stands in the New Testament only in Hebrews 13:2 and Romans 12:13, and in both letters it comes after philadelphia, brotherly love.
- Two chapters earlier the letter calls the patriarchs strangers and exiles on the earth, so the readers are asked to receive the kind of people their fathers in the faith had been.
- Readers differ on whether the reason is a memory of Genesis alone or also a hope that a guest may prove to be God's messenger.
Where the Passage Stands in Hebrews
The passage follows the warnings of chapter 12 and draws on what the letter has said of its readers and of the patriarchs.
Hebrews 13:1 to 3 is the passage behind the saying about entertaining angels unaware. It belongs to hospitality, the value of receiving the stranger and the guest, and its second verse commands that welcome. Every believer decides at some time whether to open a door to a person he does not know, and these verses tell him what the first churches were asked to do.
The question is what the three commands ask, why the second one gives angels as its reason, and whether that reason is a memory or a promise. The answer comes from the Berean words of the three verses, the Greek words behind them, the hosts of Genesis the verse recalls, and the readers' own history in the letter. John Calvin, Adam Clarke, Albert Barnes, Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, and Tertullian give the three readings of the reason, and a homily of John Chrysostom shows how the verse was preached.
The last command before the passage concerns worship, and the passage itself shows what that worship asks of a church.
Therefore, since we are receiving an unshakable kingdom, let us be filled with gratitude, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe.The commands of chapter 13 follow this call, so the love of brothers, guests and prisoners belongs to the worship God accepts.
The readers' own past fitted them for the passage, and the writer had set it before them three chapters earlier.
Sometimes you were publicly exposed to ridicule and persecution; at other times you were partners with those who were so treated. You sympathized with those in prison and joyfully accepted the confiscation of your property, knowing that you yourselves had a better and permanent possession.The second and third commands of chapter 13 ask the readers to keep up a care they had shown in their first years of faith.
Chapter 11 tells of Abraham living in tents in the land of promise, and one verse there sums up how all the patriarchs saw themselves.
All these people died in faith, without having received the things they were promised. However, they saw them and welcomed them from afar. And they acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.The Greek for strangers in this verse is xenoi, from xenos, the root of philoxenia, the hospitality of Hebrews 13:2.
Three Commands in a Row
Each of the three verses gives one command, and the second and third each add a clause that grounds or measures the command.
The three commands move from the brother to the stranger to the prisoner, and only the command about strangers is grounded in an event of the past.
A ladder of three rungs, one for each verse of Hebrews 13:1 to 3, in five columns drawn from the Berean text and the Greek.
Verses 1 and 3, Brotherly Love and the Prisoner
The first command keeps a love the readers already had, and the third reaches to prisoners and the mistreated.
Continue in brotherly love.The first of the three commands concerns the love that members of the church owe one another.
The Greek verb is menetō, from menō, to stay, so the command asks that brotherly love remain where it already stood. John Calvin, in his Commentary on Hebrews, gave the reason the command was needed: "nothing flows away so easily as love".
Remember those in prison as if you were bound with them, and those who are mistreated as if you were suffering with them.The third command asks the readers to feel the prison and the mistreatment of others as their own.
The participle sundedemenoi, bound with them, comes from sundeo, and this verse is its only use. Calvin wrote on the verse, "There is nothing that can give us a more genuine feeling of compassion than to put ourselves in the place of those who are in distress."
For I was hungry and you gave Me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave Me something to drink, I was a stranger and you took Me in, I was naked and you clothed Me, I was sick and you looked after Me, I was in prison and you visited Me.’Jesus names the stranger taken in and the prisoner visited in one list, the same two people that Hebrews 13:2 and 13:3 set side by side.
The Hosts of Genesis Behind Verse 2
The commentators name two hosts of Genesis, Abraham at Mamre and Lot at the gate of Sodom.
At the Oaks of Mamre, Abraham saw three men standing nearby in the heat of the day (Genesis 18:1 to 2). He ran from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground.
The Words of Verse 2
The verse turns on one noun, philoxenia, and on three verbs, to forget, to lie hidden and to be a host.
The Greek of verse 2 opens with its noun, philoxenias, of hospitality. The lexicon glosses philoxenia hospitableness. It defines the root xenos as foreign and, by implication, a guest. The sense of philoxenia is set by its use for one practice, the receiving of a guest into a home.
Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Outdo yourselves in honoring one another.Paul sets this love of the brothers three verses before his charge to practise hospitality.
Share with the saints who are in need. Practice hospitality.Paul sets philoxenia in a list of duties for every believer in the church at Rome.
The verb of the command is epilanthanesthe, from epilanthanomai, which the lexicon glosses to lose out of mind, and the Berean text renders it do not neglect. The writer uses it three times. God will not forget the love the readers showed in serving the saints (Hebrews 6:10). In turn they are not to neglect hospitality (Hebrews 13:2) or doing good and sharing with others (Hebrews 13:16).
The reason reads in Greek elathon tines xenisantes angelous, glossed word for word "unawares some have entertained angels". The first verb is lanthanō, which the lexicon glosses to lie hid and which stands six times in the New Testament. Joined to the participle of xenizō, to be a host, it says that the hosts received their guests without knowing whom they received. Both verbs are in the aorist, the tense Greek uses for a past event told as a whole.
Xenizō stands ten times in the New Testament. Among them are the night at Joppa when "Peter invited them in as his guests" (Acts 10:23) and the three days Publius received Paul on Malta (Acts 28:7). The verse's last word is angelous, from angelos, which the lexicon gives as angel and messenger.
How the Verse Has Been Taught
John Chrysostom preached on the verse in his thirty-third homily on Hebrews and dwelt on the word unawares.
died 407 · John Chrysostom
Chrysostom asked what unawares means and answered that the hosts "entertained them without knowing it". He held that this made the reward great, since "if he had known it, it would have been nothing wonderful". He then turned to the noun the writer chose for the command.
“And he did not say, ‘Be not forgetful’ of the entertaining of strangers, but ‘of hospitality’: that is, do not merely entertain strangers, but do it with love for the strangers. Moreover he did not speak of the recompense that is future, and in store for us, lest he should make them more supine, but of that already given. For ‘thereby some’ (he says) ‘have entertained angels unawares.’”
John Chrysostom · Homily on Hebrews 33 · on Hebrews 13:2Patristic
Is the Reason a Memory or a Promise?
Teachers of the church have read the reason of verse 2 in three ways, each with its holders and an objection drawn from the text.
The reason recalls Abraham and LotJohn Calvin; Adam Clarke
Adam Clarke, in his Commentary on the Bible, wrote of the same verse, "Abraham and Lot are the persons particularly referred to."
The objection: the writer gives the event as a reason to keep showing hospitality, and a reason that held no hope for the reader's own house would give him little motive.
The guest may be God's messenger, and Christ is received in himJamieson, Fausset and Brown; Albert Barnes; John Calvin
Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, in their Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), read the verse as an answer to the wariness people feel toward a stranger. In their reading such a stranger may prove to be sent by God for good as truly as the angels were, and a believing guest stands in the place of Christ.
Albert Barnes, in his Notes, Explanatory and Practical, found the motive in a hope for the host's own house. He wrote that by entertaining the stranger "we may perhaps be honored with the presence of those whose society will be to us an honor and a blessing". Calvin answered those who said such visits were rare: "not mere angels are received, but Christ himself, when we receive the poor in his name."
He who receives you receives Me, and he who receives Me receives the One who sent Me.Jesus ties the welcome of His messengers to the welcome of Himself, the ground on which Calvin and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read Christ into the guest.
The objection: Hebrews 13:2 speaks only of angels, and the reading of Christ in the guest comes to the verse from the words of Jesus in Matthew 10 and 25.
A stranger today may be an angelTertullian
Tertullian, in his treatise On Prayer (chapter 26, in S. Thelwall's translation of 1885), told the host not to send a guest away without prayer. He added that this held "especially" for "a stranger, lest perhaps he be an angel."
The objection: the reason tells of hosts who have already received angels, and the verse makes no promise about the guests a reader has yet to meet.
An Open Door for the Stranger
The passage asks a church under pressure to keep three loves at once, for its own members, for travellers it does not know, and for those in prison. Whatever a host expects of his guest, the command stands on its own, and Peter gave it to the churches he wrote to in a single line.
Show hospitality to one another without complaining.Peter asks for the same welcome among believers and names the spirit in which it is given.
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- The tagged Greek text of the New Testament, with Strong's numbers, morphology and glosses (STEP Bible, Tyndale House, Cambridge, CC BY 4.0)
- STEP Bible TBESG, the brief lexicon based on Abbott-Smith (1922), entries g5381, g5360, g1950, g2990, g3579, g3581, g32, g1198 and g4887 (Tyndale House, Cambridge, CC BY 4.0)
- John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews (1549), translated and edited by John Owen (1853), on Hebrews 13:1 to 3.
- Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible (1832), on Hebrews 13:2.
- Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), on Hebrews 13:2.
- Albert Barnes, Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832 to 1869), on Hebrews 13:2.
- John Chrysostom, Homilies on Hebrews, Homily 33, on Hebrews 13:2.
- Tertullian, On Prayer, chapter 26, translated by S. Thelwall, Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume 3 (1885)
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