philoxenia

The word is built from two others: the word for "loving" or "dear," and the word for "stranger" or "guest." Literally it means "love of the stranger," but long before the New Testament it had settled into a concrete practice: taking a traveler into your household and giving them food, a wash, a bed, and safe passage onward. This was not a social nicety. Ancient inns were dirty, dangerous, and often little better than brothels, so a traveler far from home depended on a private household opening its doors.

For the first Christians this became essential infrastructure. Missionaries, letter-carriers, refugees, and traveling teachers moved constantly between small assemblies, and there was no safe or acceptable place for them to stay unless fellow believers took them in. That is why the New Testament keeps pressing it. Paul tells the Romans to "pursue" hospitality (Romans 12:13), borrowing a word he normally uses for chasing down or hunting: believers are to go looking for chances to host, even while they themselves are being hunted by persecutors. Hebrews warns readers not to forget it, recalling that Abraham welcomed three travelers who turned out to be angels (Hebrews 13:2). In Romans 12 it stands next to the warm family affection believers owe each other (φιλαδελφία), but it faces outward, toward the traveler with nowhere safe to stay.

What sets this apart from the ordinary hospitality of the surrounding world is who it is for and why. In the wider culture, hosting was mostly a bond between social equals who could repay each other. Here it is extended to strangers who cannot repay, and it rests on a startling claim: the stranger at your door may be a messenger from God, or Christ himself, and you yourself are only a temporary resident on the earth.