1. During the scorching heat and glaring light of noon, while the birds seek the densest foliage and the wild animals lie panting in the thicket, and everything is still and silent as midnight, Abraham sits in his tent door under the spreading oak of Mamre. Listless, languid, and dreamy as he is, he is at once aroused into brightest wakefulness by the sudden apparition of three strangers. Remarkable as their appearance no doubt must have been, it would seem that Abraham did not recognize the rank of his visitors; it was, as the writer to the Hebrews says, “unawares” that he entertained angels. But when he saw them stand as if inviting invitation to rest, he treated them as hospitality required him to treat any wayfarers. He sprang to his feet, ran and bowed himself to the ground, and begged them to rest and eat with him.
The whole scene is primitive and Oriental, and presents a perfect picture of the manner in which a modern Bedouin Sheikh receives travellers arriving at his encampment; the hasty baking of bread, the celebration of a guest's arrival by the killing of animal food, not on other occasions used even by large flock-masters; the meal spread in the open air, the black tents of the encampment stretching back among the oaks of Mamre, every available space filled with sheep, asses, camels-the whole is one of those clear pictures which only the simplicity of primitive life can produce.
The description presents a perfect picture of the manner in which a modern Bedawee sheykh receives travellers arriving at his encampment. He immediately orders his wife or women to make bread; slaughters a sheep or some other animal and dresses it in haste; and bringing milk and any other provisions that he may have ready at hand, with the bread, and the meat which he has dressed, sets them before his guests. If these be persons of high rank, he stands by them while they eat.1 [Note: E. W. Lane, The Modern Egyptians, i. 364.]
2. Later writers saw in the scene a picture of the beauty and reward of hospitality. It is very true, indeed, that the circumstances of a wandering pastoral life are peculiarly favourable to the cultivation of this grace. Travellers, being the only bringers of tidings, are greeted from a selfish desire to hear news as well as from better motives. Life in tents, too, of necessity makes men freer in their manners. They have no door to lock, no inner rooms to retire to, their life is spent outside, and their character naturally inclines to frankness and freedom from the suspicions, fears, and restraints of city life. Especially is hospitality accounted the indispensable virtue, and a breach of it as culpable as a breach of the Sixth Commandment, because to refuse hospitality is in many regions equivalent to subjecting a wayfarer to dangers and hardships under which he is almost certain to succumb.
“This tent is mine,” said Yussouf, “but no more
Than it is God's; come in, and be at peace;
Freely shalt thou partake of all my store,
As I of His who buildeth over these
Our tents His glorious roof of night and day,
And at whose door none ever yet heard Nay.”
East differs from West; but courtesy and loving-kindness are the same under all guises. True welcome never consisted in meats and drinks, but in the affection of the heart. Love can make a little gift excel. The sympathy which feels for others' need, the kindness which is happy in serving, the modesty which says little and does much, the open house and heart and mind-these are some of the elements of hospitality. But this grace cannot be analysed. “There is,” as Washington Irving says, “an emanation from the heart in genuine hospitality which cannot be described, but is immediately felt.” Abraham and Sarah found that the rewards of hospitality are spiritual. It brings a blessing to the giver as well as the receiver, and some who show love to strangers entertain angels unawares. The hosts and hostesses of the Bible, generous and philanthropic souls who did not squander the gifts of God on sinful pleasures, nor hoard them for selfish ends, but delighted to spend them in doing good-Abraham and Sarah, Rebekah and Abigail, the women of Sarepta and Shulem, and like them the sisters of Bethany, Lydia, and Prisca, and Gaius-found that their kindness came back to them an hundredfold in the hallowing memories and heavenly influences which lingered in their homes, and in the joy of the diviner life to which they were called and stimulated by the messengers of God.1 [Note: J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, i. 109.]
3. There is no doubt as to the august character of one of the three who, on that memorable afternoon, when every living thing was seeking shelter during the heat of the day, visited the tent of the patriarch. In the first verse we are expressly told that Jehovah appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre, as he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day. And in the tenth verse there is the accent of Deity, who alone can create life, and to whom nothing is too hard, in the words of promise which tell how certainly Sarah should have a son. And, besides, we are told that two angels came to Sodom at even. Evidently they were two of the three who had sat as Abraham's guests beneath the tree which sheltered his tent in the blazing noon. But as for the other, who throughout the wondrous hours had been the only spokesman, His dignity is disclosed in the amazing colloquy which took place on the heights of Mamre, when Abraham stood yet before the Lord, and pleaded with Him as the Judge of all the earth.
If it is asked why God adopted this exceptional method of manifesting Himself to Abraham, not as on other occasions in vision or by word, but eating with him as his guest, the only apparent reason is that He meant this also to be the test applied to Sodom. There, too, His angels were to appear as wayfarers dependent on the hospitality of the town, and by the people's treatment of the unknown visitors their own moral state was detected and judged. The contrast between the peaceful afternoon with Abraham and the diabolic night in Sodom is full of significance.
It was believed in the Middle Ages that when a saint was doing Christ's work among the poor, often the form of the outcast was in a moment transfigured; and the visitor received his reward, for he found himself in the presence of his Lord. A friend once said to Dr. John Duncan that he did not feel Christ to be with him, and that he would like to get nearer Him. “Yonder He is,” said the Professor, “seeking the lost. Go there, and you will find Him.”1 [Note: J. Wells, The Life of James Hood Wilson, 94.]
The real measure of the religious spirit in a man is not, as so many mediæval teachers believed, absorption in devotion and continual consciousness of sin; it is rather the keenness and completeness of one's consciousness of the presence of God in all things, and of the revelation of God through all things. One often meets devout people whose sense of the presence of God seems to be almost entirely historic; they believe that God was with Moses and with the Israelites in their wanderings, and that over those wayward children and over their confused and painful journeyings a Divine purpose presided; but in the world of to-day they see on every side the evidences of the activity of an evil spirit, and only here and there the evidences of a Divine order and control of affairs. Carlyle, whose historic imagination was masterful, expressed passionately in his last years the longing that God would speak again! He could hear the Divine voice speaking in the accents of Knox, Luther, and Cromwell; he could not hear it in the tones of Maurice, Stanley, or Bright. It seemed to him as if God had vanished out of human history when the rugged soul of Cromwell took its flight. There are hosts of devout people who believe in a past God, but who have very slight hold on faith in a present God. Older peoples seem to them to have been divinely led, their own people to stumble on blindly and in a helpless confusion of aims and ideals; other ages seem to them to have been sacred, this age seems devoid of Divine recognition.2 [Note: H. W. Mabie, The Life of the Spirit, 10.]
