A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Luke 21: 1-4) once again sees Jesus in the
temple, as seems so often to be the case in the gospel of St Luke. This briefest
of scenes, in which a poverty-stricken widow puts two small coins in the temple’s
treasury, might strike us as being as insignificant as the woman’s offering,
and yet its importance far exceeds all appearances. For it tells us something
important about the way God judges things in comparison to us, and about what our
hearts are called to do in relation to God.
This incident sits between two other crucial moments and
comments on them both. In the first, Jesus warns the disciples about the teachers of the law who love attention and the honours paid
them, but who pray with hypocritical ostentatiousness and who, Jesus says, devour
widows’ houses, possibly by abusing their role as legal executors for the
deceased husbands of the widows. In the
second scene, following the incident of the widow’s mite, Jesus responds to the
disciples’ admiration of the glories of the temple by promising that not one
stone will be left on another; every one of them will be thrown down.
Both these lessons call for the disciples and for us
to readjust our evaluation of the things of this world: our adulation for certain
people and our attachment to material things. We love to create heroes, and we savour the
thrill of appearances. Transposed into a religious mode, these enthusiasms risk
leading us, first, to lionize certain classes of people – perhaps clerics or consecrated religious, perhaps those with certain talents – and, second, to be enthralled by sacred
affectations. The preening status of the scribes
and Pharisees was offensive to Jesus for two reasons, first, on account of the
hypocrisy and unworthiness of the Jewish leaders, and second – we tend to
forget about this - on account of the foolishness of those who idolized them. This
same foolishness also came into play in the disciple’s admiration for the
temple with its fine decorations and gilded dome. It would be easy to assume
that the affectations Jesus here condemns consist in sacred formalism with its
pomp, circumstance, incense, and ceremony. The temple was, after all, the
centre of the Jewish liturgy. And yet, such formalism is just as deeply present
in every one of our contemporary religious affectations for informality. Some decades ago,
a big to-do was made of the abolition of the papal coronation, but thereby was
abolished the ceremony in which, three times in succession, a Master of Ceremonies would show
the newly crowned pope a brand of burning flax and announce in a loud voice: Sic
transit gloria mundi – thus passes the glory of the world. It would be hard to turn such formalism into a cause for self glorification. No pope now benefits from this physical and public demonstration
of the transience of his position. Would that every leader and CEO were led to
their office chair by their own underlings with as tangible a display of the
fact they will not be there for long. The point is that we must hold the
dignity of others and the dignity of things sincerely but lightly; not turn them into idols
that secretly shore up our insecurities or serve our own satisfactions.
In the middle of these two scenes, as I say, comes the scene
of the widow’s mite. Who was this woman, the poverty-stricken widow, a
figure after whom surely the Lord quickly sent a disciple primed
with a generous donation? Poverty-stricken is the English translation, a
term suggesting humiliating levels of deprivation. One might fancy the widow was Jesus’
own mother – the as yet unrecognised ark of the new covenant in the temple of
the old covenant – were it not that Mary’s poverty is likely to have been of a
gentler kind.
No, this widow who gave her last mite to the temple clearly had
no protectors left but God alone. With her husband gone, she may well have been
defrauded of any residual wealth by the actions of one of those corrupt lawyers
whom Jesus had just denounced, and yet here she was before the treasury ready
to give her last penny. It would be the typical position of such lawyers to accuse her of rash providentialism in her
readiness to give away her last coins. Was
it not, they might ask, the act of a desperate fool to make this
donation, instead of looking after herself?
But thereby, they would have shown themselves unfit for the
spiritual moment in which they were living. Like Simeon and Anna, this widow was probably one of the faithful ones of Israel whose hopes were bound up solely in seeking the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, and awaiting the coming of the Messiah to liberate God’s people. She may
have had no physical wealth left, but in her heart was written the Shema Yisrael
of the Jewish faith:
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and
with all thy might.
Why then did she give her last two coins, as poverty stricken as she was? We do not know for certain but we can surmise. She did so because she had no adulation left for the nostrums of rich lawyers and religious heroes; she did so because she had no material possessions left to enthral her widow’s heart with their attractions; thus denuded of every earthly kind of wealth and reduced to utter spiritual and physical poverty, she did so, in the end, because love knows no measure.
It is as the poet Edna St Vincent Millay said in a rather different context:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light!
May we be privileged to say "yes" to the Lord like the widow, even when we give our last coins.
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