Offering Hospitality: Questioning Christian Approaches to War

Introduction

1 Introduction A Christian Response to Power Set during the Mexican Civil War, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1940) follows the life of a whisky priest as he tries to save his life and protect the faithful. There is no doubt that the priest is a fallen man—he is an alcoholic; he has had affairs with women in his parish; he is filled with self-­ loathing. While intent on doing penance, there is one thing he refuses to regret: that he’s fathered a child. Shot and injured by a socialist lieutenant who hates everything the Catho­ lic Church stands for, the priest runs for a gloomy three days before returning to danger to perform his priestly duties. For his effort, he is killed. The whisky priest is a Christ figure. This is hinted at even before his death. While evading the lieutenant and trying to minister to his congregants, the priest seeks out his graceless daughter. She is the en­ capsulation of dirty humanity. Nonetheless, the priest tries to impart to her an important lesson in the midst of a horrid war. He went down on his knees and pulled her to him, while she gig­ gled and struggled to be free: “I love you. I am your father and I love you. Try to understand that.” He held her tightly by the wrist and suddenly she stayed still, looking up at him. He said, “I would give my life, that’s nothing, my soul . . . my dear, my dear, try to 2  Offering Hospitality understand that you are—so important.” That was the difference, he had always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the state, the republic: this child was more important than the whole conti­ nent. He said, “You must take care of yourself because you are so—necessary. The president up in the capital goes guarded by men with guns—but my child, you have all the angels of heaven” (Greene, 2005: 79). There are some people who do not like to acknowledge the allu­ sions to Christ in this undisciplined priest. Yet to deny this in part denies the dual nature of Christ: that the Word became flesh (John 1:14) to settle our sin because humanity is so important. In the Trinity, there is the Father that cares for his Son and for his children—his crea­ tures inhabiting his creation—all interceded for by the Spirit. Scholars of international relations, with the discipline’s focus on the state—on republics and tyrannies alike—and on all the continents, tend to lose sight of the children, of humanity, and forget that they are so very nec­ essary. Humans require care. Care is not something easily and readily done in international relations—nonetheless, it is an essential practice in a world increasingly divided between the privileged who inhabit stable powerful states and those who are in weak, conflicted states and, thus, at considerable risk. Finding ways to care, to practice hospitality by seeing to the needs of those on the margins, is the purpose of this study. There are multiple occasions in the Bible that Christians are taught to care. One such an example occurs in Luke 9:10–17, the feeding of the five thousand. The story is multilayered, but Jesus commands the Disciples to perform hospitality; when they want to send the crowd away, Jesus says, “‘You give them something to eat.’”1 (Which is more of a command than a request.) Still they protest, but after more in­ struction, they do as Jesus tells them. After feeding the crowd, there are twelve baskets filled with enough food for the Disciples. This is a clear story of hospitality and God’s provision, but it is more than that. The Disciples, who struggle to grasp what Jesus is trying to tell them, in the Introduction  3 end act without self-­ interest (even their suggestion to send the crowd away was selfless, “‘Send the crowd away so they can go to the sur­ rounding villages and countryside and find food and lodging’”). Act­ ing without self-­ interest reaps them rewards: they are fed, along with everyone else. Comprehending that the daughter of a drunken Catholic priest is important, indeed more important than the protected president or the state, upends notions of what is of primary concern in international...