Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC
Proper 27 B - Sunday, November 7, 2021
Before the scene with the widow, the Gospel writer gives us an account of Jesus giving his disciples a scathing critique of the religious leaders of his time for their greed, pompous behavior, and blatant exploitation of the poor. Jesus tells his followers to "beware of the scribes". "They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers." What does this really mean?
The Temple in Jerusalem was not only a religious institution. It was an economic institution as well with hundreds of employees. It performed many financial functions, including operating as a central bank and treasury. The priests and scribes received a cut from every Temple sacrifice and a portion of a tax collected on every first-born child. Other offerings (some of them better understood as taxes) brought in even more wealth for them, so much so that these priests got into the business of lending money. That meant they were also able to foreclose on property if the debt was not paid. And when someone died, the scribes would immediately come in to help "manage" the deceased person's property because, of course, they couldn’t let the widow do that. Widows in first century Palestine lived on the margins of society, with absolutely no social status, and vulnerable in every way that mattered. And, yes, they charged a fee for their services. And as if that weren’t enough, this kind of exploitation always ended in sanctimonious long prayers.
In the days leading up to the scene in today’s Gospel story, Jesus has called out time and time again the hypocrisy of the religious elite and the economic and political absurdity and exploitation he witnesses around him at every turn. In a very carefully orchestrated act, he processes into Jerusalem on a donkey to mock Roman pomp and circumstance. He drives out of the Temple those who were selling and those who were buying and turns the tables of the money changers. He refuses to answer the chief priests, scribes, and elders when they question him about where he gets his authority. He tells a provocative and scathing parable against chief priests, scribes and elders about a vineyard and a murdered son. He exposes the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and Herodians on taxes by confounding them. And on a ridiculous question by the Sadducees about whose wife a widow is at the resurrection, who has been given in marriage seven times, Jesus responds that they know neither the scriptures nor the power of God.
Given all of this, and that Jesus has just blasted the scribes for their fake and pretentious piety and the corrupt religious institution they govern, I find it hard to believe that the only point to this story is that Jesus wants us to applaud a destitute woman for giving her last two coins to the very institution he considers corrupt. But perhaps what Jesus does want is to take the focus of his disciples (and ours) away from the rich, and to really see this widow.
Jesus, whose eyes are always on the small and the insignificant, wants his disciples and us to really see this woman whose widowhood rendered her worthless and expendable, and yet, had the courage to make her “insignificant” gift with such dignity alongside the rich with their fistfuls of coins. Jesus wants his disciples and us to really see this astonishingly generous woman who trusted that her tiny gift had value in God’s eyes. Jesus wants his disciples and us to really see the true and consecrated vocation of this widow whose hands moved at that impulse of God’s love, and who really trusted the words of the psalmist:
Happy are they who have the God of Jacob for their help! *
whose hope is in the Lord their God;
Who made heaven and earth, the seas, and all that is in them; *
who keeps his promise for ever;
Who gives justice to those who are oppressed, *
and food to those who hunger.
Jesus wants his disciples and us to recognize the true and prophetic power of this woman, who with two coins that together had the value of less than a penny, demonstrated her subversive resistance to dehumanization and a holy denunciation of injustice and corruption.
Perhaps the lesson from today’s Gospel story is for us to call out (as Jesus did) any form of religious practice or belief that manipulates the vulnerable into self-harm and self-destruction. Any practice of faith that encourages our apathy in the face of economic, racial, gender, and political injustice. But perhaps most importantly, what we can learn from the widow is that riches come, not from acquiring, but from a letting go that takes us to the border between life and death where there are no guarantees, only hope; no security, only love, and a total surrender to God, who alone suffices.
I will end with a few lines from one of my favorite poems by Santa Teresa de Ávila:
Nada te turbe,
Nada te espante,
Todo se pasa,
Dios no se muda,
La paciencia
Todo lo alcanza;
Quien a Dios tiene
Nada le falta:
Sólo Dios basta.
(Let nothing disturb you, Let nothing frighten you, All things are passing away: God never changes.
Patience obtains all things. Whoever has God lacks nothing; God alone suffices.)
¡Que así sea, en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo!
Amen+
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