On Dangerous Hospitality
One of the first chapter books I owned was a little paperback my dad bought for me, called The Watchmaker’s Daughter. It must have been a child’s adaptation of Corrie ten Boom’s story in The Hiding Place, which I wouldn’t read until I was old enough to brave it.
I loved Corrie. I loved her father, Casper. I loved the way I imagined the ten Boom home when I read about it, the Beje—the long, wallpapered dining room, the tall windows perched over the street in Amsterdam, the flowers in the boxes, the stacked stories with twisting stairs and cubbies just big enough to hide in.
Corrie’s life would take her into the teeth of death and back, to a concentration camp with the sneering name, Ravensbruck. Her story is long in the grueling way, and it always makes me feel cold. But after all the beatings that would mark her, I find it something that Corrie marked her life’s story with a title that reminded her, not of her prison, but her home.
The Hiding Place was a 2-foot by 2-foot panel on the lowest shelf of Corrie’s bedroom bookcase that slid open into a secret room, and it was the salvation of 5-6 Jewish people at a time, whom the ten Booms sheltered from the Gestapo. The refugees would spend hours in that cramped space until the danger passed, unable to speak, cough, or drink anything.
But when the house wasn’t under raid, it was just as much theirs as it was the ten Booms. They ate together, sang around the piano together, and studied God’s Word at the table. In fact, the ten Booms had practiced these little acts of worship before the war ever descended on free Holland. So when the Reich drove hunted Jews to the door of their watchmaking shop and home, they simply welcomed them in—as if they belonged at the dining room table just as much as one of the ten Boom children did. After she was arrested and shipped to Ravensbruck, Corrie and her sister would continue to welcome people into their prison bunkroom, where they offered God’s Word to the starving women like a satisfying meal.
I remember reading Corrie’s story as a girl and thinking the ten Booms were lionhearted. I thought they were doing the work of martyrs—holding their lives between loose fingers for the sake of someone else. The ten Booms were all these things, because they understood a very simple virtue that transcended any situation:
Hospitality.
Hospitality, in the true, biblical sense, is dangerous. It is the work of a martyr, because true hospitality is not just a good fruit of a Christian’s life—a set table with cloth napkins and lemonade. Hospitality is the life of the Christian. The life of the Christian is meant to be laid out and given away.
“Lord Jesus,” Corrie would pray, waiting for a knock from the police to make their house tremble, “I offer myself for your people. In any way. Any place. Any time.”{i}
Hospitality moved Corrie to welcome God’s people to her table, the same way hospitality led Mary and Martha to welcome Jesus to theirs:
“Now the chief priests and Pharisees had given orders that if anyone knew where [Jesus] was, he should let them know, so that they might arrest him. Six days before the Passover, Jesus therefore came to Bethany, where Lazarus was…
“So they gave a dinner for him there.”
~ John 11:57-12:2
Jesus was a hunted man, yet there was nothing subtle or secret about dinner, the Jews’ main meal of the day. Martha cooked and didn’t seem to worry that the scent might steal into the street. No one seemed hurried to rush Jesus to somewhere safer, maybe because they knew that where Jesus was, that was the safest hiding place.
And so Martha baked the bread, Mary poured the perfume, Corrie brewed tea for a few extra guests, and none counted the cost of their hospitality. None stood back like Judas and calculated how much the sacrifice was worth. That’s because true hospitality is unmeasured, costly, and as dangerous as it needs to be to serve Jesus in any way, any time, in any place—even the smallest place.
i. Corrie ten Boom, John & Elizabeth Sherrill. The Hiding Place. (Bantam Books: 1971, New York, NY), 74
Note: You can find more information about the ten Boom home, including a virtual tour (that I got lost exploring) here.
bethanyjlincks.com 