Dear People of God, brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour, our world delights in excessive attention to appearances as distinct from reality; and today Our Blessed Lord gives us a healing insight into God’s awareness and appreciation of the difference between appearance and reality, which is of supreme importance for us in the reality of the spiritual life:
Jesus sat down opposite the treasury and watched
the people putting money into the offering box.
Many rich people put in large sums. A
poor widow came and put in two small copper coins which make a penny. And He called his disciples to him and said
to them, “Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who
are contributing to the offering box. For they all contributed out of their
abundance, but she, out of her poverty, has put in everything she had, all she
had to live on.”
Who
was the poor widow? We do not know of
course … we know nothing other than that she was very poor and very devout. However, In order to make her a more real
subject for our consideration I would like to compare her with those Catholic
people of today who feel that they have so very little, indeed nothing, to
offer God or to give mankind. These people
are oppressed secretly by what they think of themselves. They see themselves as incapable of doing
anything of note or real worth; they do not speak well, they have no physical ‘presence’
or bearing, let alone any personal confidence.
They have faults, even sins, which though they would love to be rid of,
nevertheless they seem unable to throw them off. Again, past and confessed sins may keep on
cropping up again and again as unwanted memories, or as the same old temptations
which, though they do their best to resist them, nevertheless keep returning
again and again.
Let us now turn our attention to our Blessed Lord and Saviour.
You
will remember, People of God, that at the very beginning of His Public Life and
Ministry, He was led by the Spirit into the desert where He was tempted by
Satan. The Evangelists give varying
descriptions of this time of trial, but the fundamental issue seems to have
been, that Jesus should show Himself as a political Messiah, a military leader
who would lead the oppressed Jewish people in revolt against their Roman masters
and raise the standard of the Kingdom of God by political and, if necessary,
forceful means. Jesus, however, was not
deceived, and Satan left Him, according to St. Luke’s enigmatic expression, until an opportune time.
Later
on, near the end of His successful ministry in Galilee the enthusiastic
inhabitants of that area wanted to seize Jesus after His miraculous feeding of
the 5,000, in order to set Him at their head as the Messianic King, to lead
their army. Jesus simply escaped their
clutches.
Thus, at the beginning of His ministry, at His moment of success in mid-course, and so again, almost at the end of His life’s work, Jesus encountered the same temptation; for less than a week before His death, a thronging crowd in a paroxysm of excitement could be heard proclaiming as He entered Jerusalem:
Hosanna, blessed is He Who comes in the name
of the LORD! Even the King of Israel! (John 12:13)
They waved palm branches and strewed their clothes in His pathway, proclaiming Him as leader and Messiah indeed, but as the Messiah to fulfil their political and military aspirations, not the One bringing messianic fulfilment for their role as People of God for the salvation of all mankind.
People
of God, we should reject despondency even though it may be that, after many
years, we find old temptations and trials raising their heads at times and
trying to re-assert themselves. For Jesus,
our Lord and Saviour, though there was no trace of sin whatsoever in Him, nevertheless,
we see how the same trial, the same wearisome temptation of the Devil, kept
rearing its head through the entire course of His public ministry. And -- on the other hand -- we can, in
our turn, offer the widow’s mite to the glory of God, if and when,
despite our feelings of wretchedness, despite all temptations to despair, we
continue to give our own ALL by never saying ‘yes’ to such temptations …. As
St. Gregory the Great taught, ‘the Devil can put all sorts of thoughts into our
head, all sorts of feelings into our body, but he cannot make us say ‘Yes’ to any such things.
Our
‘all’, little though it may seem to us – just as the widow’s mite no doubt appeared
to her in comparison with the much, much larger offerings of rich donors – our
maybe miniscule ‘all’ is,
nevertheless, inviolate, purest gold,
for God’s glory, thanks to our abiding
oneness with and in Jesus, and thanks to our enduring obedience to Spirit of
Jesus living and ruling within us – never giving a consenting, accepting, ‘Yes’
to the Devil’s solicitations.
There
is something about Jesus’ behaviour in today’s reading that we should ‘wonderingly’
admire and ponder: He allowed this poor woman to put into the Temple treasury everything she had; ALL she had
to live on.”
How was she going to live
after that gift? Would she be relying on a son or daughter, a friend, some organization
for old widows?? Jesus doesn’t consider
anything beyond the woman’s beautiful, total, love for the God of Israel. He
did not tell His disciples to give her something; He simply loved, admired, delighted in such
self-abandonment for God, because He saw that His own future self-sacrifice on
Calvary did have an unsuspectedly solid basis in God’s People. For Jesus, total, self-committing,
love of God surpassed everything, and justified all that it emblazoned.
Jesus had -- in His
twelfth-year -- been acknowledged as a man with regard to His observance of the
Law, and in that special ceremonial He had
been so ‘enraptured’ by the, love, adoration, and Personal commitment, He felt
towards His heavenly Father, that He
remained in the Temple for three days hearing of, and talking about, Israel’s God with the Temple
scholars and doctors, and He never once thought of the caravan going back to
Nazareth; nor, indeed, could He understand Mary-and-Joseph’s anxious three-day-search
for, and solicitude concerning, Him. Why
were you worried? Did you not know that
I must be in My Father’s house?
And He never, humanly,
apologized for having been carried-away with love for and delight in God, even
though they had been so worried. He had
come, He once said, to cast fire on earth, and therefore, wherever He found total, committed,
love of God, that surpassed everything else and justified all that it emblazoned.
If you remember, dear friends in Christ, it was Judas the traitor, who foreshadowed our modern irreligious world by presuming to teach Our Lord and the Eleven about Christian Charity:
Judas the Iscariot, one (of) His disciples, and the one who was about to betray Him, said, “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” He said this not because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief and having charge of the money bag used to help himself to what was put into it (John 12:4–6)
The same is happening all over the world today; the Devil having taken charge of souls, then tries to convince them about his version of holiness; so be aware, dear friends, do not allow yourselves to be impressed by appearances ‘praised and plugged’ by pagans, however ‘cultured’ they may appear to be. Look to Jesus, Who knows and loves you through and through; hope and trust obediently in His Spirit Who will guide you surely to where Christ is with His Father; and thank the Father Who gave His Son for us, and gives His Spirit to us, so that we can become His own true children in Jesus.
