Strangers in a Strange Land: How to Make Friends and not Estrange People

Leviticus 19:33-34 – "When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as a native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the LORD your God."

Leviticus 19:24 – "There shall be one standard for you; it shall be for the stranger as well as the native, for I am the LORD your God."

I recently spent nearly two weeks in Palestine enjoying the hospitality of my friend, Dennis Sobeh, and his family. I considered posting while I was there, but for security reasons I refrained. Now after four hours of security questioning at entrance customs, one and a half hours at Qalandia Checkpoint and three hours of security checks of my person and luggage to leave Israel, I believe I can safely reflect online about my trip.

You may think I’m joking or paranoid, but customs first held me under suspicion of being a political activist, because I was traveling alone to Ramallah, West Bank. The last person to question me about my reason for traveling said he wouldn’t be so kind if I wound up in his office again. When I returned to the airport they took every precaution: checking the taxi, my luggage, my luggage, my person, my luggage, and my person again at different checkpoints in and out of the airport. As such, I decided to avoid any potential links between anything that could smack of political criticism/activism of Israel and me.

These events drastically differed when I was with Dennis. His family and friends treated me as one of the family and as the guest of honor. People were interested to learn about me and made certain I had whatever I needed. When I traveled alone to Jerusalem (Dennis’ family is not permitted to travel to Israel like most Palestinians living in the Palestinian Territories) I stopped by a shop to introduce myself to my friend’s uncle, Sammi. He made sure I had anything I needed as soon as I explained that his nephew from Illinois, Alex, told me to stop by.

Having been treated so differently got me thinking about strangers for the rest of my trip (I had only been there 2.5 days when I went to Jerusalem). How should we treat strangers—as security risks or as guests of our hospitality or both? Miroslav Volf reflects upon the treatment of strangers in his Exclusionand Embrace: Theological Explorations of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation.

The will to give ourselves to others and “welcome” them, to readjust our identities to make space for them, is prior to any judgment about others, except that of identifying them in their humanity. The will to embrace precedes any “truth” about others and any construction of their “justice.” This will is absolutely indiscriminate and strictly immutable; it transcends the moral mapping of the social world into “good” and “evil” (29).

We don’t get to choose whether or not we will encounter strangers. We only choose how to respond—exclusion or embrace. But embracing the stranger is no simple task. We must consider whom we are making space for and embracing. What is a stranger? Is it someone unfamiliar to us, someone who doesn’t belong?

When the stranger’s identity confronts ours, we position their identity in some intelligible context and respond accordingly. The Israeli customs connected my identity to the Arabs I was to visit and to previous foreigners who traveled for political demonstration, so they greeted me with suspicion. My hosts connected my identity to their son’s and so accepted me as one of the family. If we fear the other’s identity, then we exclude and estrange. If we are comfortable with the other’s identity, we welcome and embrace. The hospitality demanded by YHWH’s law and by Jesus’ command to love the neighbor and enemy, however, requires us to reverse this action. We let our perception of the stranger determine our response. Rather than letting the context of the stranger’s identity determine how we treat her or him, we must be willing to embrace regardless of the connections of a stranger’s identity with what we ‘know’ about him or her.

So what does this embrace look like? This radical hospitality takes its form from the crucified God who makes space for a world in contradiction to him. Jesus came to his own, but they treated him like a stranger (John 1.11). Estranged, Jesus made space in household for the world. Jesus’ hospitality looks like treating strangers as friends. Rather, it means turning strangers into friends. This is the goal of making space for others’ identities and embracing them. To follow Jesus then means we don’t get to pick our friends—we simply bear the responsibility of embracing a stranger and gaining a friend.