There was once a certain father who had decided to throw a small dinner party. So he proceeded to invite ten of his friends and family to his home for a pleasant and relaxed evening together. A few nights before the event, one of those friends asked him for permission to bring a guest. The father, being a gracious man, immediately told his friend that the guest was welcome to come.
When that friend arrived on the night of the party, the father was surprised to find that he had brought three other guests rather than the one about whom he had asked. But seeking to be a good host, he invited them all inside. He asked his wife to help prepare some extra food and went about adding a few chairs and place settings.
But while he was preparing for the unexpected additions, the man was puzzled to hear more and more knocks at his door. All those invited had already arrived, so who could it be? As it turned out, the friend who brought those three guests had also told them that they were each free to bring guests of their own. And because the man was busy making accommodations, his friend decided to be helpful by answering the door for him and inviting them all inside.
The father returned to his guests only to find a dozen strangers in his home. But even as he considered how to respond, more continued to arrive. He began turning them away at the front door, but some of the strangers became angry, for they had expected their friends to be welcomed. They soon began letting their own acquaintances in via the back door while insulting their host for his callousness towards them.
The man’s home had quickly become more crowded than he had ever seen. Though a few of the unexpected arrivals had been thoughtful enough to bring a bottle of wine or a bag chips, there was nowhere near enough food to go around–and certainly not enough space. In the hustle and bustle of so many people, glassware and decorations frequently broke. One by one, the home’s toilets became clogged and the wastebaskets overflowed. The stench of gathering filth and unwashed bodies became as overwhelming as the noise.
His children had long since fled to their bedrooms to avoid the horde of strangers in their home. But as the intruders expanded further into the house and opened the closed doors looking for more space, the terrified children retreated further and hid in their closets and under their beds. A few of the strangers who had been leering at the host’s wife earlier now had her cornered in the kitchen.
The father had had enough. He gathered the friends and family he had originally invited, and together they began expelling people from his home one by one. Some left begrudgingly but voluntarily. Others had to be roughly thrown out. For the remainder, he called the police for assistance in removing the intruders. The process was long and painful. More than a few were injured or bloodied in the struggle.
Some called him heartless and cruel for refusing to share. Some flatly told him that he had no right to a home for his own exclusive use. Some coldly asked whether he truly thought a few clogged toilets and broken dishes were more important than the human beings he was casting aside. Some wailed at how much he must hate them to treat them so harshly. A few even claimed that because it is was a very cold evening and they had lost their coats, he was sending them out to die. The (now former) friend who had started it all berated him for acting so out-of-character and for failing to show Christlike hospitality to the stranger.
But the father would not be moved by any of their foolish and self-serving words. For the sake of his family, he relentlessly continued until every last stranger had been removed from his house, and he had cleaned up the mess they had left behind.
We all have certain moral responsibilities to guests and to strangers. As Christians, we even have responsibilities towards our enemies. However, God has given us more fundamental responsibilities to our families–as Scripture says again and again. What’s more, these responsibilities are not hermetically sealed to the nuclear family. They become more abstract as they extend further from cousins to tribe and then to nation, but they do not disappear. No command to love enemies and strangers allows us to turn our families or nations into consumable resources for them. If you love your enemies by hating your friends, you are doing it wrong.
There are times when a stranger sets himself against your family. Your responsibility to your family then requires you to take action against the stranger. Sometimes, this is because the stranger is wicked and needs to be restrained by the sword, as when an intruder breaks into your home. Sometimes, this is because the stranger is fulfilling an office that sets him against your people, as when enemy soldiers fight against your nation. And sometimes, the sheer number of strangers and scale of their actions are inherently burdensome and you must act towards a group rather than an individual.
In the parable, the volume of visitors to the father’s house changed his moral priority from being a gracious host to being a staunch defender of his family. He neither had nor needed personal animosity towards any of them as individuals; but circumstances demanded that he throw them out without exception all the same. Likewise, a nation’s moral responsibility to a sojourner passing through its land and its moral responsibility to millions of migrants seeking permanent settlement in its land are not at all the same thing. Mass immigration changes our moral priorities.
Its shameful that this simple distinction is completely lost on so many of our pastors and teachers. It has reached the point where denominations have official service organizations dedicated to dispossessing Americans by facilitating the largest mass migration in all of human history. Many of our pastors and teachers will even take those self-serving objections to deportation and put them in the mouth of Christ, condemning as evil any who would defend their people from invasion. The stricter judgment should terrify such men. In the meantime, however, it falls on Christians to be wary of the false teachers among us and refuse to abandon God’s Word for their traditions.
Christ observed that even pagan sinners could manage to love their own. It is only modern Christians who fail even that lowest of standards. May the Lord bring us back from the depths to which we’ve fallen and remind us of our most important responsibilities.
