Monday of the Thirty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
There are few things in this life that I think we can take for granted. True sports fans will always flirt with superstition. We'll always find something in the last place we look. And the commentary that the older generations offer on the younger generations has a kind of cyclical character. in my own conversations with people of various generations, I've often heard one consistent criticism - entitlement. In today's Gospel, Jesus praises an anti-entitlement heroine.
In my own experience and based on today's readings I think the concern about entitlement is a human struggle, not necessarily a generational one. In fact, I think it is that very struggle that lies at the heart of the distinction between the two parties in the Gospel. Let's take a moment and first look at the distinction between the poor widow and the people Jesus refers to with the words, "those others."
This distinction should avoid two fundamental flaws. One, I do not believe that Jesus is romanticizing real, severe material poverty. Two, I think we would be staying to close to the surface to assume that it was the actual wealth of the people that made the largest difference. Instead, what I propose is that it was the lessons that were internalized because of their wealth or lack thereof that makes the difference. It is not the action as much as the statement the action makes. It is their entitlement or lack thereof.
The wealth only gave from their surplus wealth as an expression of their sense of entitlement. They believed that money was truly theirs, and it was their right to keep it for God's provision was owed to them. Anything above their need was an expression of God's favor and could be given back. Likely, as they are posed as the foils of the widow, they were the determining voice in what was needed and what was surplus. The widow, on the other hand, had come to know the provision of the Lord but also the fickleness of this material existence. She knew that we can not take anything for granted. Instead, she lacked entitlement for she recognized that all things rightly belong to God. She gave all she had today for tomorrow she may have nothing to give at all.
May we go through this day sharing the widow's spirit, one of generosity learned from God's generosity, and one that does not take for granted all that the Lord has done for us.
- Spencer Hargadon