Probably in response to Genesis 18 (and its resumption later in Hebrews), the rule of Benedict states "let all guests be received like Christ." In a Benedictine Abbey, special kitchens are to be kept open for guests who arrive at irregular hours. This commandment to hospitality finds an ancestor in the story of Abraham, who ran to meet three unexpected visitors from his tent door and to welcome (compel?) them into his house. It is from him that the traditions of all his descendants “include injunctions to offer hospitality to the stranger.” Abraham insists the three men allow him to wash their feet, and to serve them water and bread. These practices echo all over the ancient world, recognizable as both honor for guests and expectation of good hosts. Although practices may vary, the Abrahamic traditions all agree that Abraham’s example commits all those who claim his patrimony to the expression of hospitality to strangers. And it is this hospitality that is dramatized in Rublev’s 14th century piece.Let us venture a provisional definition of hospitality, because its popularity as a buzz word in a pluralistic context has allowed many kinds of slippage. By the fact of the neighbor’s presence, we are sharers of space in which various goods are common to all: “let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under a tree, while I fetch a morsel of bread.” What those goods are may change over time and place. But whatever the goods in common might be, the stranger lays claim to them for her own reasons. Those reasons need not orient on any axis of values held by the host. A great deal of listening will likely be necessary in order to identify what those goods in common are, but they are bound to be there. When they are discovered, a good host will ensure that inasmuch as she is able, she procures the interests of the guest without determining for the guest the proper reasons for such goods. To do all the good one can for one’s neighbor as that neighbor understands goodness: this is the understanding of hospitality I will suggest. Abraham recognizes the needs but implores the men and awaits the consent of their stopping at his house. He then offers his guests the best from what he has, a choice, tender calf. Abraham’s service to them is extravagant, what the New Testament would call latreia. If we have any doubt about what the text means when it has Abraham call the men "lord" (Adonai), we are relieved of it by the slaying of a choice (Heb. twb) calf, exactly as would be prescribed by Torah’s own commands. Rublev’s icon shows the three men at a table, with one of the men blessing a chalice in which is the head of a lamb. While this is definitely Eucharistic imagery, hearkening to sacrifice of Christ enacted in the Lord’s Supper, the genius of Rublev’s account is that he shows that sacrifice via Abraham’s finest wealth, placed at the disposal of his guests, doing all the good he can. And, importantly, there is no clear evidence in the text that Abraham knows the identity of the men to whom he offers his hospitality, at least until much later, when the men set out to perform judgment on Sodom and Abraham names them “Judge of all the earth.” True, the Torah’s most common rationale for hospitality is that the Israelites were themselves aliens once (Ex. 22:21, Lev. 19:34, Deut. 10:19, et. al). But Abraham serves whoever comes to him “as unto the Lord.”
By so doing, some have entertained angels unawares (Heb. 13:2): Rublev captures the unawareness precisely in that he does not render what is inexpressible to word or image. This is not exactly the Trinity. It is, the text and his rendering show us, three men. But it is also, the text tells us, somehow, an appearance of YHWH. This indirectness is not typical of icons. Indeed, this image is liable, insofar as it is called an icon of the Trinity, to tremendous theological misrepresentation. The contents of this icon, read literally as a representation of God, would lead one not to Trinitarian faith but to tritheism. Rublev forces the reader to remember, and never to stop remembering, that she is reading a visual representation of an Old Testament text! And yet it is precisely so that the reader discovers the Triune God revealed there, for insofar as the story is one of Abraham’s wandering and Sarah’s barrenness (cf. Is. 40), of exiles surprised by God in the desert (Hosea 2), of tables set in the wilderness (Ps 23, Ps 78:19), the icon narrates the story of Israel. And it positions, literally front and center, the sacrifice of the Passover Lamb, shared in the one chalice, as the focus to that entire history. Again, this is not how icons of Christ typically work. In the case of the Transfiguration, the crucifixion, or even the Pantokrator, all that the icon claims is seen in the face of the Son of God. But here, we search in vain even for Christ. Rather, we are given the history of God leading his people through the desert, providing for them in unexpected ways as they wander, both feeding them and feeding the world through them. Within this story of Israel, a secret begins to make itself known, as the various symbols and motifs of Israel’s history coalesce around the table Rublev knows, from his privileged position on the receiving end of Israel’s history, to be set for God. Which of these three does Abraham address by the singular “lord?” It is dangerous to speculate, and Abraham’s actions do not differentiate. Similarly, it is fruitless to differentiate practically
the “God” we serve from among the neighbors with whom Christians live, and when Christians work for the common good of those neighbors, they are making choice offerings to the Lord.
Following his source text, Rublev insists that nobody involved needs to recognize their work as an offering for that to be in fact what it is. There are dangerous consequences to this, since failure to serve the neighbor would by Rubev’s logic be a sin against God. Indeed, it is exactly the straw of bad hospitality that breaks the camel’s back in Genesis 19, occasioning the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Thus, hospitality precedes fruitful engagement with others not merely for pragmatic reasons, but because there is simply no way to know whom we are receiving, or whom we deny. This is not to say, however, that there are no benefits to be realized. Indeed, working to procure for our neighbors the goods common to us both will likely win a measure of trust that allows conversations to begin and continue (this will be explored below). Rather, it is to insist that whether or not such benefits materialize, Abraham’s children are committed to be hospitable for higher reasons. The stranger is a means of grace for us in that she places a vital check on our desire to gather for ourselves alone, and in so doing, she compels us to live lives of offering to the God in whom, as Augustine reminds us, we love our neighbor. Rublev shows us nothing if not that.
In its respect for these boundaries, then, hospitality represents one (all too rare) way of dealing with the logic of election, to which all of Abraham’s children are in some way or other committed. Scripture and history alike testify to the danger that election represents among sinful people. So often, and so easily, election justifies us/them dynamics that allow unspeakable acts of violence and destruction. For many in the 21st century, language of election is inherently to be avoided. They see election as the religious enshrinement of the native fear and mistrust of strangers. And it must be conceded that such fears are justified, for example, when one considers Sarah’s hostility and abuse of Hagar. The world can be a fearful place, and often it seems as if religious beliefs merely ossify those fears and baptize fight and flight responses. But the stranger in the midst of Abraham’s community turns out, unexpectedly, to be the bearer of the promise of Abraham’s favor in the eyes of God. God’s actions for the elect, we learn, are precisely to deliver them from fear. Terrorism and “wars of religion” are not inherent to the logic of election but opposed to it, in that they stem from the fear for the security of one’s election. It is the person secure in her status before God who can be hospitable (cf. Gen. 13, where Abraham gives Lot first choice). It is exactly our fears about the truth of our election that the other in our midst mercifully forces upon us, and invites us to commit to God for healing.
Rublev keeps these elements of the story both present and held carefully in the background. The tree and the house, Abraham and Sarah, remain in back of the cold, unearthly gazes shared by his three figures. They stare inexplicably in a circle, at one another, unflinchingly held within an embrace they alone share. Our ways are not their ways, and their thoughts are not our thoughts. To receive them, to wash their feet and serve them food, is to acknowledge oneself as an outsider. It is to respect a boundary one cannot cross. Abraham and Sarah disappear from view like table waiters: the first family of Israel reduced to such a position. These three men are unabashedly the center of the story Rublev is telling. To sit with them is to sit away from them, and to recognize the reality of one’s own otherness. It is to allow the searching gazes to call us radically into question. On what basis dare we call ourselves children of Abraham? It is uncomfortable, and if one takes Rublev seriously that this is a window into God, fear is not at all out of the question!
Again, Rublev’s icon, it must be remembered, is an icon of three men, that is, three human beings. They are communicating God to us, but not in some other way than as the strangers that visited Abraham. Insofar as we look at them, we cannot help but see God, but we cannot at all identify them as God. As Rowan Williams observes, “We have granted that this is not a 'picture' of the Trinity in any ordinary way, and that the three figures are not straightforwardly portraits of the three divine persons; rather we are looking into and following the path of the divine process of dealing with us to reveal and save.” That path and process, as has already been said, is the story of Israel’s election, finding its fulfillment in the crucified Lamb whose blood seals the New Covenant. These strangers, unsettling as they are, do indeed bring us good news of God’s welcome issued to us and to all. And if we are willing to seek in the contours of their strangeness the message of God, if we are willing to sit at this table and brave our inevitable anxieties as they come upon us, then we are permitted, unthinkably, to remain at this table. “She has chosen the good portion, and she shall not be deprived of it” (Lk 10:42). As has been noted by many of Rublev’s readers, the fourth seat at this table belongs to the one who views it. We become the other in the midst of the other, enabled to “go with them on their way” (v. 16), and to be the presence that (potentially) brings the other to a crisis. “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?” We become the representative to the people we have hosted, now the guest among them, calling them into question: “shall not the judge of all the earth do right? (Gen. 18:25). And this mutual act of calling of one another into question, ensconced in a mutual welcome and the assurance that we will do all the good for one another we can, even at high cost to ourselves, simply is what agape will look like in a pluralistic context. Not only this: it is what it means for Christians to give faithful witness to the world in a way that does not blind them to what surprise God might be speaking to them through the outsiders among whom they live. To the degree that this does not occur, it is because of flinching responses to the realities that press in upon us, through the uneasy presence of the other. That is, Christian witness is hampered by a failure to recognize (heremeneuō) the stranger as a means of grace, as Christ present to us in disguise, drawing us into fuller recognition of the miracle of a people chosen for God.
All of this means that Rublev’s icon is hermeneutically significant. It is a way of helping Christians discern the voice of God speaking in the complexities of the Old Testament and, thus, of the world. Natalie Van Kirk observes how Christian images in the early and medieval church were meant to train the eye to see God. The evacuation of images from much worship, she argues, has had detrimental effects probably unintended by those who removed them, for “even those of us who do not think we are using images are indeed surrounded by them, and when the images with which we surround ourselves contradict the words that we speak or read, we are in great danger of creating such cognitive dissonance that the entire message becomes incomprehensible.” This claim has resonance with an earlier one that failing to show hospitality to the stranger in our midst is dangerous, because of just whom we might be failing to serve. Similarly, if we do not allow our image of the other to be disciplined by God, our fear will not hesitate to produce a caricature. And God forbid we should see the finger of God and name it as the work of darkness (Mt. 12:26-32)! Jesus’ words on this score are utterly unsettling: “They will also answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty…?’ He will reply, “truly I tell you, ‘whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me’” (Mt. 25:44-45).
Rublev’s icon insists that under no circumstances can love of God be divorced from love of neighbor. Instructed by it, the observer allows the form of Abraham’s guests to discipline her vision, such that she finds every other stranger she meets to be the image of these three. And this of course is the point, Biblically speaking. A Trinitarian theology of hospitality sees the other in light of the fact that God is our guest and we are His. For all Abraham’s many faults, he is tenacious and desperate to know the Lord, so much so that he offers his best animal at the faintest chance that the stranger will turn out to be the veiled face of God. The Benedictines expect God in the guise of a guest, because, like Rublev, they know whose table they serve. They know that servers at this table drink from the Passover Chalice whose wine quenches all thirst. Rublev’s three men, for all their Trinitarian echoes, are only echoes. But the thing to which they witness, the slain Lamb in the center of the table, focuses the icon and interprets it. In the end, the only icon can be the crucified body of Jesus the Stranger, raised up for the world’s deliverance. Icons train us to discern that blessed body and to love what we see. For to love Christ is to love God and neighbor at one time. Rublev’s icon, then, like all good Trinitarian theology, contains an entire Weltanschauung. He understands everything that is to depend for its existence on God in Christ, through whose body and blood we are drawn in to the witnessing community and empowered by the Holy Spirit. In that community, God heals the alienation that makes us strangers to each other and ourselves. His power removes our corruption, makes us images of God for one another, and through us orients all creation towards a table where He is Giver, Guest, and Gift. At that table, no man will teach his neighbor, saying “know the Lord,” for they shall all know Him, from the least to the greatest. Small wonder then that this mere sketch of the Lord’s Table, prepared in the wilderness, had the great Florensky lost in Alleluias.
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