St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons)

by Karen Armstrong

When they arrived in a village, Jesus told them, they must knock on a door and wish the householder peace; if he was kind enough to admit them, they must stay in that house, working with their hosts and “sharing their food and drink: for the worker deserves his pay . . . When you enter a town and you are made welcome, eat the food provided for you, heal the sick there, and say: ‘The Kingdom of God has come upon you.’”30 The Kingdom became present whenever somebody had the compassion to admit a needy stranger to his home, when that stranger received food from another and then offered something in return. Peasants, Crossan explains, had two overriding anxieties: “Shall I eat today?” and “Shall I become ill and fall into debt?” In Jesus’s system, if one person had food then everybody could eat, and there would always be somebody to care for the sick. This interdependence and mutual sharing was both a Way of Salvation and a Way of Survival.31 This was not simply a social program masquerading as religion; premodern men and women had no concept of the secular as we know it. All the great spiritual traditions have insisted that what holds us back from enlightenment is selfishness and egotism; they have also said that a practical concern for everybody (not simply those who belong to your own class or those you find congenial) was the test of true spirituality.