Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Today's Scripture


Today’s reading from St. Mark’s Gospel is a challenging one. In the second section when we encounter Jesus sitting across from the treasury with His disciples, we hear Him teach the disciples an important but difficult lesson. It is natural to think that the rich who are placing large sums of money into the treasury are in fact contributing the most. Jesus, however, asks us to see with God’s eyes. He explains to His disciples, and to us, that in reality the poor widow made the largest contribution, even though the numerical amount she put in was the smallest. This is a difficult and challenging message for us, because it means we should examine our own contributions, including financial.

I think that financial contributions can sometimes be one of the most difficult forms of contributions to give, especially for those of us living in the prosperous west. We may not feel very prosperous during our current difficult economic situation, with many of us out of work, but that does not change the fact that our society has more amenities than most of the rest of the world. For example, most of the world does not have easy access to clean water, and water is necessary for even basic human survival. Even in times of prosperity we often find it difficult to give generously. Notice, the rich in today’s reading are depicted as giving less than the poor widow. Most of us have natural concerns about giving to God through the Church, and this goes for our time and other resources as well as our finances. Will I have enough time if I spend more for the Church? Will I have enough money if I give more to the Church? These are important concerns.

In today’s first reading from the First Book of Kings we see this same concern in the widow who encounters Elijah. Notice that like the woman we encounter in the Gospel reading, she too is a widow. Elijah, the prophet of God, asks for food. She explains that she barely has enough for one last feeding for her and her son, after which she expects them both to die. Elijah asks her to place her trust in God that if she offers this sacrifice for God’s prophet, God will provide for both her and her son. Indeed, this is what happens. In an anticipation of Jesus’ multiplication of bread in the New Testament, the woman’s jar of flour miraculously remains full for an entire year.

God is trustworthy. We can trust the Lord with our time and with our finances. We do not need to give large sums of money to the Church, but we do need to give more than we think we can give, even if it’s only a little more than we think we can give. As with the widow in today’s first reading, God will provide more than we could naturally expect.

For today, perhaps we can examine how much we give to the Church in terms of time and money. Perhaps we need to pray about increasing how much we contribute, even if this means only by a small fraction. We should strive to be more like the poor widows in the Gospel reading and in the first reading than the rich who only appear to truly give much when they could give much more. God is not asking most of us to starve, although He might be asking us to rethink how we spend our time and our money so that we can reorganize our priorities. We need to learn to make contributions from our poverty, placing our trust in the Lord.

Jeff Morrow