When I was last teaching a World Lit survey course in the Spring, I had a student who—as part of an end-of-semester creative project—set up a faux Instagram account for Odysseus, on the theory that if there’s one epic hero who would be on social media, it would be him.

Odysseus, after all, is an absolute diva in the original Homer: this is the same man, after all, who came up with the big, giant, theatrical Trojan horse to end a ten year war; who gleefully shouted his real name at the Cyclops after barely getting away; who had sex with Circe the witch-queen to free his men from her curse; who insisted on being tied to the mast to hear what the Sirens sang while everyone else just plugged their ears; and who personally murdered all the suitors who’d been hitting on his wife. In every single situation he found himself in, Odysseus unfailingly chose the most colorful, flamboyant, grandiose choice of action available. In comic book terms, Odysseus isn’t Bruce Wayne, he’s Tony Stark!

Hence when I saw the first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey a few months ago, it struck me as an utter mismatch: for of course the same director who ushered in the whole grimdark trend in 2000s-era cinema with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight would bring the same muted color palette to Homer. In Nolan’s hands, Odysseus was clearly going to be awkwardly shoehorned into the Batman role, when, again, he is clearly much more like Iron Man. They should’ve copied the color schemes of the MCU rather than DC.

Of course I knew I would still need to watch it: the overwhelmingly positive reviews and record-breaking box office haul meant that most of my students will have watched it by the time I teach the Odyssey again next Spring. Simply as an educator, I had a professional obligation to watch it—especially since the majority of my students are young people of color, and the joyless conservative boycott of the film has apparently centered upon the “woke” casting of black actors to play Athena, Elpenor, the Bard, and especially Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world.

Which of course reveals that the boycotters have never actually cracked open the Odyssey itself. Seriously, right in Book 1 for example, Homer reveals that the whole reason why Odysseus was finally able to escape from Calypso’s island in the first place is because Poseidon was busy visiting his worshippers in Ethiopia. Africa is very much a present and ongoing concern in the original epic milieu, an entire continent that the Greeks were keenly aware of and with whom they had traded for centuries. The Aethiopica by Heliodorus, incidentally, is also an ancient Greek novel that climaxes in Ethiopia. Likewise, there is a long, well-documented history of intellectual exchange between Greece and Egypt that stretches clear back from pre-Socratic times to the late-Roman empire. For that matter, Greece is geographically far closer to Africa—which remember borders the entire southern Mediterranean—than to what was then the barbaric backwaters of western Europe. It would frankly be far odder for there to be no people of color in Homer’s Mediterranean (on par, incidentally, with Nolan failing to portray all of Indian soldiers in the British army who also needed to be evacuated in Dunkirk). For these weird boycotters to claim that there shouldn’t be any black people in the Odyssey is to prove that they have never actually read the Odyssey, or a history book, or just looked at a basic map.

Besides, it’s not the film’s historically-accurate diverse casting that should’ve offended these conservatives the most, but it’s relentless focus on Xenia: The sacred law of hospitality.

For laying aside all the historical anachronisms with the armor and such, the muted color palette, the Boston accents (as though British accents are any more accurate), and the creative liberties taken with the text that other critics have already pointed out, the one thing that Nolan thankfully got absolutely right about the Odyssey is how the text really is an extended sermon on the sacred law of hospitality.

The Trojan War itself, you see—if it really did happen at all—is generally dated to between 1300 and 1200 BC, known to historians nowadays as the Late Bronze Age Collapse. This was an era when almost every major civilization on earth suffered some sort of catastrophic toppling, perhaps due to some sort of ecological disaster caused by volcanic eruptions or something, resulting in mass migrations among almost all peoples for new homelands in every direction. This is the same era when Egypt was besieged by the mysterious “sea peoples” from the north (they only barely survived the Late Bronze Age Collapse by the skin of their teeth), and is also when the Hebrew Exodus of Moses is traditionally dated—which, even if there’s no supposed archeological record for this event, still fits in with the mass migrations of that historical moment (and for what it’s worth, the Ten Plagues of Moses follow rather faithfully the stages of a volcanic super-eruption, e.g. days of darkness, fire raining down, river running red with sulfur, leading to a plague of frogs leaping from the rivers, then an explosion of flies eating the dead, and etc.). The Trojan War, if it really happened, was likely not fought over some woman named Helen at all, but for control of the lucrative Bosporus that connected together trade between the Mediterranean and the Black Seas, which would have promised greater wealth for any of the nearby kingdoms desperate for economic stability amidst mass civilizational collapse.

And so too would Odysseus, blown all over the Mediterranean by forces far out of his control, be representative of the plight of countless refugees of the era, scattered all over the Earth by the fall of almost all civilization. Heck, the Aeneid—Virgil’s Roman fan-fiction for Homer that narrates the Trojan War from the Trojan’s perspective for a change—posits that the mighty Roman Empire was first founded by Trojan refugees fleeing to Italy for a new homeland amidst the devastations of the Late Bronze Age Collapse.

What both the Odyssey and the Aeneid share together, in fact, is the conviction that in an era of mass societal collapse, the need to care for the stronger becomes not just a common courtesy, but a religious duty. If some refugee washed up on your shores, the only thing preventing you from robbing him of everything he’s worth and slitting his throat is the understanding that the gods would smite you if you tried it. There were no courts or cops or border patrols there to enforce the sacred law of hospitality after all; you must care for the stranger because you fear the gods. “All strangers are sacred to Zeus” is what Odysseus quotes to the Cyclops—with the understanding that when Polyphemus gets his eye stabbed out after eating his men, he was being justly punished for violating the sacred law of hospitality.

All throughout the Odyssey, in fact, both bad hosts (the Cyclops, Circe, Calypso) and bad guests (the suitors) are punished for violating the sacred law of hospitality, wherein they take advantage of someone else in their distress. Again, the entire Odyssey can be read as a religious sermon against violating the sacred law of hospitality.

And it is here that I cannot help but note that the Savior in Mathew 25 declared of those that will be found on his right hand at the Last Day, “I was a stranger and ye took me in,” while those found on his left hand are those of whom, “I was a stranger and ye took me not in […] for inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it unto me.” Judea, after all, was part of the same Mediterranean milieu as the ancient Greeks, with the same deep understanding of the importance of Xenia. It’s not just Zeus that strangers are sacred for, but Christ Himself. When Christ said that the two great commandments are to love God and love thy neighbor—that upon these two hang all the law and the prophets—He was also preaching Xenia.

So stirring was this scripture in fact, that when the Church in October Conference of 2016 announced its initiative to assist the Syrian refugees, it was entitled the “I Was a Stranger” project. It was future apostle Patrick Kearon who gave the talk outlining the program, after which President Uchtdorf—himself a former East German refugee—was openly weeping. It was by far the most inspiring General Conference talk I’d ever heard, on par with when Brigham Young straight-up cancelled Conference to organize the rescue of the Willie Hancart company.

Hence my even more profound disillusionment when, only a month later, the bare majority of U.S. Latter-day Saints voted for the candidate who ran on a platform of viciously denying the Syrian refugees entry—this same man who also ordered border control to kidnap children from their parents, who is actively trying to deport refugees even if they did come here legally, and who regularly slanders these same immigrants as “rapists and criminals” despite being a confirmed rapist and criminal himself. The “I Was a Stranger” program swiftly withered on the vine—the last new post about it on the Church’s website dates to summer of 2017—and we haven’t had a single other truly inspiring Conference talk since then.

That is, we have all collectively—both as a nation and as a church—utterly failed to obey the sacred law of hospitality. It is why the Odyssey is still as relevant now as it was 2,700 years ago, and why Christopher Nolan was exactly right to adapt it for our current era; it is also, not coincidentally, why the words of Christ are also just as vitally important now as they were 2,000 years ago and counting. Whosoever hath ears to hear, let them hear.