Early in Les Misérables, the convict Jean Valjean is met with welcome and hospitality from the poor local bishop, Myriel. Valjean is shocked by the man’s kindness, which contrasts so sharply with the rejection he has faced from everyone else, especially given Myriel’s relative poverty himself. But that night, Valjean still steals the bishop’s silverware and flees.
When he is arrested and brought back, Bishop Myriel—in an act that will change Valjean’s life—forgives him, and gives him not only the silverware but his candlesticks as well.
When I encountered stories like this as a child, I remember hoping I would never be asked to be that generous. And as adults, many of us think of generosity in that sense of grand sacrifice; the strength to give till it hurts. Perhaps this is why we tend to leave what we consider serious generosity to other people. Special people.
After all, our own resources don’t seem like they could withstand much taxing (“I’m too poor to give a proper gift,” “I wish I had more time to help,” “My house isn’t nice enough to have people over”). And we ourselves are … ordinary. Why would our presence be of value to anyone, let alone our meager skills? Besides, if something comes naturally to me, it can’t be of spiritual value.
It might appear I’m about to give you a pep talk about how you and your gifts are valuable (and in a way, I am). But everything I’ve just described is wrong, starting with the conception of generosity itself, so giving you a Fight Song would just be a Band-Aid. Our generosity isn’t crippled by our lack of self-esteem—not exactly. It’s crippled by something bigger. And the key is in Bishop Myriel’s story.
What exactly are we offering?
The bishop’s generosity doesn’t start with something grand. It starts with hospitality.
When we reduce our understanding of hospitality to “entertaining”—to putting on a Pinterest-worthy performance—we naturally focus on what we lack. Our home is too small, our cooking too basic, our conversation too awkward. In a secular economy, these seem like fair enough reasons to skive off. Better go hide behind some takeout and Netflix again.
But take your excuse, whatever it is, and try putting this in front of it: “I’m a royal child of the King, entrusted with the riches of His kingdom and called to invite others into it, but I won’t, because I’m not good at cooking.”
Doesn’t hold up so well, does it? And sure enough, Myriel unhesitatingly offers what he has, because he knows something Valjean doesn’t.
The word “generosity” originally referred to someone “of noble stock.” [1] Over time, its meaning shifted from simple bloodline to the special virtue expected of nobility. For Christians, these meanings converge beautifully: we are children of the King. Our generosity flows not from painful self-denial but from our royal identity. We give because that’s what princes and princesses do. We share because we have inherited abundance.
Historically, the centerpiece of Christian worship is a feast—in which Christ pours Himself into His Body, the Church. Everything we are flows from that; fed by the royal feast ourselves, we are equipped to go invite others. It’s not primarily ourselves and our gifts we are to be generous with—it’s the feast.
As a fairly serious home cook, I offer that this is worth thinking about.
You see, a feast takes things that are dying and transforms them into new life. One minute, my counter is covered with bits of a dead chicken and pig, dead grains ground up, fruits and vegetables plucked from the plants and living on borrowed time. The next minute, these things have been transformed into maple garlic bacon chicken, which gets offered with love to my family and neighbors. They become a foretaste of the great feast to come, where all things will be made new.
Stop. Don’t buzz past that. I’m saying that mess on my counter is literally divine grace at work in the world. The imago Dei taking death into its hands and saying, “Start working backwards.”
But the pan-frying isn’t the whole art, of course; it’s only the first part.
We live in a broken world. It was made for communion, but everything that’s supposed to be united has been set at odds. So often, we see woman against man, parents against children, mankind against creation—and of course, the image of God against God Himself.
The only one of the above examples where I couldn’t have said “and vice versa” is the last one—God, against all odds, remains steadfastly for us. And Christian generosity joins in Christ’s work joining together things that have been torn asunder.
Let’s take a closer look at the table to which Valjean is invited. As a bishop, Myriel would be keenly aware of what is represented on it. At the table, we see:
- Mankind reconciled to creation (resurrecting the dead to new life in the food itself),
- People reconciled to each other (as stranger becomes friend through welcome),
- And finally and most importantly, God reconciled to man (remembered as we say “grace,” but far exceeding that as God meets us in our grateful gathering).
That is the nature of generosity, both our gifts (carpentry, physics, organizing things, asking questions, etc.) and our physical presence in relationship. By the power of Christ, generosity takes death and tells it to start working backwards. Myriel offers his loaves and fish knowing they are more than enough, because God’s power is limitless.
It was a loaf of bread that sent Valjean to prison. It was the callousness of his fellow man that kept him there. And it was an understanding of God as pitiless that gave him a prison far harsher than the walls that surrounded him. So in one simple gesture, Myriel offers him a key to all three doors. Not by sharing his mansion (in fact, he long since gave that away to be used for a hospital). But by sharing a glimpse of the Kingdom itself.
What sort of people are we?
Now, I could have ended this piece right there and it would’ve been a nice little motivational nudge. All comfort, no challenge, everybody wins. Go be extra-friendly at the coffee shop tomorrow.
But we’d still be in the same practical situation—we’re not the saint Myriel is when it comes to the hard stuff.
And this is where the rest of Myriel’s story comes into play.
If you only know this story from the musical, you won’t know that the first 14 chapters of Victor Hugo’s novel don’t speak of Valjean at all. They are entirely about the bishop.
Myriel arrives in his town and promptly starts giving things away, loving those who don’t want to be loved, and ordering his life so that he can be a blessing to others. Once, he even goes to the dangerous hill country to visit outlaws and thieves, and in his audacity, convinces the stunned fellows to donate many of their ill-gotten gains to the poor.
He’s often challenged. A local militant atheist arguably comes off better in a theological debate, which shakes Myriel considerably. In fact, Myriel often struggles. In his voluntary poverty, and in the face of the troubles of any given day, his one source of material comfort is … his few pieces of silverware. He pronounces to his sister that for all his economies, he could not imagine eating off of anything else.
So when he gives all of it to Valjean, he is in fact giving away the one thing he’d held back for himself—and he doesn’t hesitate.
Why? He wasn’t perfect. And he’s not a meaningless conduit for the work of God, like some sort of electrical circuit. His agency mattered, and this should hurt.
Let’s consider.
Have you ever stopped to notice the nature of the physical objects in holy communion? Bread and wine. Not wheat and grapes, which are things God made. Bread and wine. Things man made, by his God-inspired subcreation.
This is preposterous. You remember the you we talked about a while back? The one who’s insecure, inadequate, busy, perhaps socially shy, and so on? The one whose talents are meager, or irrelevant to other people? Yes, that you. God takes the humble offerings of people like that and, through them, pours eternal life into His people. All three of those aspects of reconciliation I mentioned earlier happen in holy communion—and that is the model of the rest of our lives as Christians.
You know what the most “seeker-friendly” church service format is? One that prioritizes its own people encountering, worshipping, and growing closer to God (not one that’s sold out for the best marketing tricks, fanciest lights, and inspirational sermons). Because when a visitor walks in, they can see what they’re being invited into—the life of God’s people. Likewise, the most hospitable home isn’t the one with the photo-worthy food spread that was clearly provided by a caterer—it’s the one where people feel they’ve been invited into a life of deep love that was happening before they got there, includes them, and will continue after they leave.
By the time we meet Bishop Myriel, he is reflexively kind, certainly. But he couldn’t have invited Valjean into a life he wasn’t living.
Myriel ordered his hours, and his household, according to a very different set of priorities than his neighbors. Sometimes this cost him, as it always does cost us when we offer ourselves fully. But day after day, he prioritized what Julie Canlis calls a “theology of the ordinary,” [2] not looking for God’s work—or his own calling—rarely, as in grand gestures or miracles; but daily, in the work of prayer, gardening (including flowers), honest labor on behalf of others, and hospitality. But his generosity
“…was less an instinct of nature than the result of a grand conviction which had filtered into his heart through the medium of life, and had trickled there slowly, thought by thought; for, in a character, as in a rock, there may exist apertures made by drops of water. These hollows are uneffaceable; these formations are indestructible.” [3]
When the moment for the (rare) grand gesture arrived, Myriel was ready for it. What Valjean needed wasn’t an impressive spread or clever entertainment. And even more than the material life Myriel’s silver would buy him, he needed to experience reconciliation. The creation, the imago Dei, and the Creator were redeemed in his eyes, not just by the solitary choice of Myriel, but by the little outpost of the Kingdom the bishop had created by a lifetime of generosity—which, in turn, had slowly readied Myriel himself for the moment of testing. Valjean went away a changed man, and many lives would be transformed as a result.
And Myriel? He returned to his garden, and remarked to his sister that “one really does not need either fork or spoon, even of wood, in order to dip a bit of bread in a cup of milk.” [4]
[1] “Generosity,” Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed March 1, 2025, https://www.etymonline.com/word/generosity.
[2] Julie Canlis, A Theology of the Ordinary (Wenatchee, WA: Godspeed Press, 2017), 3.
[3] Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. Isabel F. Hapgood (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1887), Book I, Chapter 13, accessed March 4, 2025, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/135/pg135-images.html#link2HCH0026.
[4] Hugo, Les Misérables, Book II, Chapter 12.
The featured image is courtesy of Julie Jablonski and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.
Brian Brown is the founder and director of the Anselm Society, whose mission is a renaissance of the Christian imagination. He also serves as Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Brian lives with his wife Christina and their two children in Colorado, where they mix cocktails, hunt for historic architecture, and see how many people they can squeeze into their house for scintillating conversation.
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