One of the first essays I wrote in college complained that it was Virgil’s fault that Dante “slandered” Odysseus in his Divine Comedy. Yes, that was the kind of writer I was… or, am. A few years later, I thought of Tennyson and Joyce as lawless suitors in the Ithacan halls, spilling out wines Homer had thoughtfully tread out so many years before. Now, I might finally be ready to share Odysseus with strangers. The temptation to call Nolan just one more James Joyce remains, but Nolan has been playing Cassandra now in his films for years. They are beautiful puzzle boxes that put a finger squarely on lessons Western society should have learned from history. More importantly, I recognize Odysseus doesn’t belong to me. They may all be getting Ithaca’s hero wrong. I may be getting that slippery deceiver wrong. That doesn’t mean Odysseus can’t be shared with those who have sought to sit at his table.

I will quibble with Christopher Nolan’s interpretation of xenia, the theme of hospitality so central to Homer’s epic. Admittedly, Nolan is less interested in “Zeus’s law” for what it meant in ancient times. Nolan’s Odyssey is a continuation of the WWII films Oppenheimer and Dunkirk. Apocalyptic Oppenheimer warned us that there was a way to win while losing ourselves. Time-dilated Dunkirk delivered the opposite, beautifully illustrating the hope of civilization triumphing through a common decency willing to risk life for others. Does The Odyssey of Nolan boil down to the negative of an episode of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood?

Homer’s xenia is more robust than “please, won’t you be my neighbor.” Perhaps Nolan thinks modern audiences wouldn’t understand Homer’s well-woven tapestry of virtue. At the end of the Odyssey film, Penelope and Odysseus speak of why their story will have to be in song: “Because we who can write won’t be here to read it to them.” Yeah, not nearly as optimistic as Dunkirk’s tea, toast, and Churchillian hope spilling to the back pages of a London daily. 

Indeed, Nolan’s retconned ending to Odysseus’ tale veers the opposite direction of Tennyson’s “life to the lees.” Nolan calls for the current generation of Western leaders to embrace penitent exile. You can imagine a future textbook on Nolan filmography noting a relevant current events detail. Between the time the director first conceptualized this film to its premiere, there were three different prime ministers in the United Kingdom. (Cue Cillian Murphy with the gavel, “Death… by exile!”)

None of which is to contest that Nolan has indeed put his finger on a relevant Homeric theme for our time. Lack of hospitality corrodes. Fear of the foreign undermines. For Homer, piety towards the gods enforced civilized hospitality. “Zeus’ law” worked because people believed Zeus was active in the world. Whenever thunder comes in Nolan’s Odyssey, someone is ready to quip at the “coincidence” (as if the writer, director, and effects team had not planned it). Indeed, as Nolan’s film ends, the “Athena” Odysseus has talked with so long is debunked like a Carl Sagan – Scooby Doo mashup. First Athena is revealed to wear the face of a Trojan priestess denied mercy at war’s end, only then to disappear completely. Would that we could see Homer’s reaction! He might pull out a top, spinning it to see if he was in someone else’s nightmare.

When Homer’s Odysseus wakes on the shores in Book VI, he wonders if he will meet either cruel savages or hospitable god-fearers. This dichotomy is repeated multiple times as Odysseus considers what he might encounter at the next stop on his way. Every time, it is an absolute either/or. “Fear of God, hospitality, and civilization are co-extensive,” Rudolf von Jhering wrote.[1] The question for Nolan’s audience is whether hospitality–which is to say, whether civilization–can indeed survive without the gods. To answer the question, I will first employ a jarringly in media res effect to honor Homer, Christopher Nolan, and, obviously not least, myself.

Several years ago, I had the opportunity to talk at length with a Christian from an eastern African country that has enjoyed relative peace. He spoke of his country working to avoid the wars of the surrounding region. People keep wanting to come to our country, he explained, and bring their wars to us. We have to keep them out. It all made sense at the time. It was years later that I met a South Sudanese pastor who walked on foot away from a conquered homeland while his line of Christian refugees were bombed. From country to country, he walked amidst murdered brothers, unwelcome to stay in any nation he could reach by foot, including the nation I had once considered a beacon of peace. Hearing that Sudanese odyssey, I reconsidered the good sense of the Christian I had nodded along to years before.

Why do we think of relative peace as belonging to us? “My country has been at peace; they want to take our peace.” The problem is our vision is too narrow. In Nolan’s film, Odysseus asks “Athena” why the gods speak in language we don’t understand. “Who doesn’t understand pain? Who doesn’t understand war? Plague? Death?” Why do we own the pain but refuse the pained? Why don’t we think of the refugee as being given to us? Is not the refugee who comes to you for aid more valuable than any other treasure? It is more blessed to give than to receive, an exiled king once said.

Near the end of Nolan’s Odyssey, disguised Odysseus confronts a suitor: “Can’t you even be generous with something that doesn’t belong to you?” The suitors would not share the bread they stole from absent (they thought) Odysseus. It is that sense of ownership which religion challenges. It is that absence of the justice-bringing master which atheism insists upon. A Homeric world where gods are active and always more powerful than you does not just lead to senseless sacrifice (Iphigenia) but also sensible charity (Zeus’ law).

The New Testament understood this. The Christian practicing hospitality believes all belongs to God. The same sermon which encouraged, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2), set the foundation for this charity with the description of faithful sainthood as “strangers and exiles on the earth” (11:13). For the believer in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob–strangers in a strange land–not just a few cattle on Apollo’s hills but “every beast of the forest is Mine, the cattle on a thousand hills” (Psalm 50:10).

This is the challenge for Nolan’s Odyssey. Nolan’s work demythologizes everything. Athena is the victim of a war crime Odysseus can’t get out of his head. Hades depicts survivor guilt for the winning commander. Telemachus’ recognizing Athena in strangers is youthful naivete, finally reproached by his father. The gods speak to us in war and pain and plague (not Scripture, not Sacrament). Humanity searches the world over to find meaning in survival. We rework endings to make sense of ourselves, denying the old poets. And so, Odysseus’ late-coming scribes have not rested at reforming his endings from Virgil on down.

The opportunity to practice hospitality is rarely grand. It does not feel self-defining. Presented before me is someone without. That man does not seem to have the ability to add anything to me, to repay me anything. He’s a dog on a dung heap–my help will be wasted energy. Wouldn’t it be better to teach him to fish? He’s bringing his wars with him, into my wife’s hall. The line between suitor and beggar seems clearer when my bow is strung in my hands.

The opportunity to practice hospitality is a simple test of whether what I possess belongs to me or not. If I am but a stranger here (heaven is my home), then I will give. The person I give to is more valuable treasure than I give up, even if what I give up is peace in my own home. Jesus’ great parable of judgment centers on just these questions (Matthew 25:31-46).

To both Timothy and Titus, the Apostle insisted every Christian pastor must be “hospitable” (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:7-8). This requirement is as essential as any other attribute, for “hospitality” is the ultimate test of whether or not love is spiritually genuine (Romans 12:9-21). There is no believing Jesus died on a cross for the world if you act as if the world has earned your enmity. “They want to steal our peace.”

Nolan is right that the lack of neighborliness is wrecking all. He sends trickster Odysseus into exile. Dante, too, invented a westward removal, with the insatiable captain finally receiving sight–but no use–of Purgatory’s distant mountain. Neither can see Odysseus as Homer did, reestablishing peace on Ithaca. This is because Homer accepted peace as a gift from the gods, possible even when a king has slaughtered or led into slaughter two generations of his isle’s men. 

The Christian knows we may not receive “peace in our time.” 

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city (Hebrews 11:13-16). 

In a sense, Nolan’s exile of Odysseus is a recognition that that the one who has stopped believing in the Divine, the one who has cleansed his home with the blood of rude guests, is the opposite of Hebrews’ stranger. The inhospitable wanders this mortal coil. The inhospitable must move on from his old treasure if there be any hope for him. 

He must gain sight not of Purgatory’s mythical mount but of simple, commonplace repentance. This is not the repentance of Luke 15:17-19, the prodigal son’s Odysseus-like planned rhetorical flourishing. No, the actual repentance of the parable of the prodigal son is in Luke 15:21-24, when the son shuts his mouth and hears the Divine talk, not in war, punishment, and plague, but in gift after gift, grace upon grace. The older son will not appreciate this hospitality (Luke 15:25-30). But the answer of the hospitable shows the genuineness of love: “All that is mine is yours.” External hospitality is enforced by fear of the gods; genuine hospitality only arises from faith in a gracious Divine.

Odysseus is a stranger to all of us. He says a lot and he says it well. What of it he means, God only knows. He can attract and gain the loyalty of men, women, poets, and gray-eyed goddesses. To claim I own him better than all those foreigners is the way of Agammemnon. We can share the stranger among strangers and learn while feasting on Homer’s lines together. From Christopher Nolan, stranger also, I learn that the church must stop nodding at inhospitable pastors and cherish what the Apostle calls necessary for any pastor, the faith that jumps to kill the fatted calf. For when I might be hospitable, what appears before me is neither irredeemably foreign, nor a disguised spiritual boon-giver. What appears before is revealed in Christ alone–the restored image of God.

I am not one to say there is a single “HERESY OF OUR TIME.” An Antiochene heresy is always ready to be counter-unbalanced by an Alexandrian heresy. That is also to say that if we only define the foreign outlaw in one direction, we’ll always fall into the opposite side ditch. This is what made the Lutheran reformation different from its contemporaries. Wittenberg recognized departures from the Scriptures on every front.

But, perhaps, a little battle cry hyperbole will gather forces to build a shield wall before dusk’s purple-blotched fingers reach across the sky: “Unconsidered hatred of the foreign, which is to say, lack of hospitality, is the heresy of the times when civilization unravels.” Insofar as there is ever a Christendom (see OG Tom Holland, the historian), it is recognizable through its love of foreigners (see, for example, Acts 15:16-19). For hospitality and fear of the Lord and civilization are (fairly) coextensive.

[1] And was quoted by the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament up front in its article on xenia (vol. v, p. 4).