What Nolan’s The Odyssey Teaches Us About Welcoming the Stranger
What Nolan’s The Odyssey Teaches Us About Welcoming the Stranger
*Editor’s note: This article contains spoilers for The Odyssey.
I went to see Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey on opening night expecting a spectacle, and Nolan delivers. There are storms, giant monsters, and a long-awaited reckoning, played by an incredibly gifted cast. But the thing that stayed with me on the drive home wasn’t the spectacle. It was a single word the characters keep repeating: hospitality.
Many of us grew up in immigrant homes where the concept of hospitality carried weight. If you showed up at our parents’ door, you couldn’t leave without eating. Our mothers would prepare food they had been saving for another event, insist that they weren’t hungry, and always offered a second plate before you finished your first. For our parents’ generation, a guest leaving our homes still hungry wasn’t an oversight. It was a shame that fell on our entire household. So when the suitors in Nolan’s banquet hall sprawl across another man’s table and eat and drink his house into ruin, I recognized the offense before the film explained it.
The Law Everyone in Ithaca Invokes
Nolan opens not at sea but in a banquet hall. King Odysseus has been gone for years, and his palace has been overrun by suitors who want to marry Penelope, seize the throne, and end her line. While they wait her out, they eat and drink Odysseus’s house into ruin.
What makes their behavior so galling, and Nolan makes sure we feel it, is that they’re breaking what the film calls “Zeus’ law.” Homer has no such phrase, but the practice was real: the guest-right the Greeks called xenia, the reciprocal bond owed to the stranger or traveler who arrived at your door under the protection of Zeus. In a world without police or passports, such a person was completely vulnerable, and the gods themselves were said to guarantee his safety. You fed him before you even asked his name, because the beggar or sojourner on your threshold might be a god in disguise.
The suitors know the law. Robert Pattinson’s Antinous quotes it when it suits him. But knowing a law and keeping it are two different things. They claim every privilege of a guest while trampling every duty of one: as xenia required the host to provide food, shelter, and gifts, the guests were to behave honorably and respect the household. The honorable characters, such as the swineherd Eumaeus and young Telemachus, simply wait for the true king to come home and set things right. Watching it unfold, I kept thinking Homer was closer to the truth than he knew.
What a Pagan Poet Got Right
Homer had no Bible. He worshiped false gods. And yet he grasped something our Christian tradition taught us to expect: that God, in his common grace, has written his moral law on the conscience of every people (Rom. 2:14–15). No people is ever left entirely without a witness to God. Homer is a case in point. He saw that how a society treats its most vulnerable stranger is the truest test of its soul.
Scripture says the same thing, only clearer and warmer. God doesn’t merely protect the stranger; he commands his people to love him: “Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:19). The New Testament calls hospitality philoxenia, which literally means love of the stranger. Where Homer only feared a god might be hiding among the guests, Hebrews makes it a promise: some have entertained angels without knowing it (Heb. 13:2). And Jesus goes further than any Greek poet dared. He doesn’t just watch the door. He stands in it. “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matt. 25:35).
The Mirror
Here’s where the movie stopped being entertainment and started feeling like a mirror. If I’m honest, much of the church I love looks less like the faithful household in this story and more like the suitors. We say we believe in welcoming the stranger. In fact, our whole gospel is centered on the idea of welcome: strangers brought near, enemies reconciled, exiles adopted as sons and daughters (Eph. 2:12–13). But the mood in many of our circles right now isn’t welcome. It’s wariness.
Nowadays, most of us may affirm the idea of welcome in principle, believing that we’re a hospitable people, while arranging our lives in such a way that welcoming the stranger never actually costs us a spare room, an inconvenient friendship, money, safety, or social standing among our own tribe. Indeed, fear of the outsider, hunger for cultural leverage, and a bunker instinct toward self-preservation have quietly crowded out philoxenia and put its oldest rival in its place: plain fear of the stranger.
This is a spiritual problem before it’s a political one. And notice where the rot sits in Ithaca. The door of hospitality never actually closes: a slave takes in a filthy beggar and refuses to shame him, a boy welcomes an unknown traveler, and the queen running out of wine gives a stranger an audience. Welcome survives at the margins of that house, among people with almost left nothing to give. The rot resides in the men with every advantage, feasting on an inheritance they didn’t earn, invoking guest-right while making sure it never costs them anything. That’s the temptation for a church that has grown comfortable.
The King Who Comes Home
Nolan’s Odysseus finally comes home, and when he does, he comes with a bow. The suitors get what they earned. It’s a satisfying ending but a thoroughly pagan one. But our King comes home differently. He doesn’t arrive to be served but having already served us, we who were the strangers, the aliens, the ones with no claim on the feast (Eph. 2:19). He absorbed in himself the judgment we deserved. And now he sends us back into the world’s banquet halls not to fortify a palace but to extend the table to invite more guests.
Homer was right about this much: when people forget how to welcome the stranger, their house eventually burns. But the gospel tells of a house that cannot burn, and a door that’s still open. The only question is whether we’ll welcome the stranger or ignore their pleas.
