Tuesday of the Thirty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
The context of today's gospel (Luke 21:5-11) is important. In verses 1-4, Jesus has just finished praising the widow who has given everything she has - two coins - to the treasury in the temple. She is compared to everyone else who gives out of their generosity, but she gives out of her poverty and Jesus clearly sees her as giving a better offering than the others, because she gives to God everything that she has.
It seems in today's passage, though, that Jesus' statement left many people who were there to grumble and mumble, for in today's passage they are worrying about costly stones and votive offerings. I wonder if what they were saying was anything like what I hear many people today say about our own versions of these things. I often hear people complain that the church has too much gold, silver and costly paintings. Wouldn't it be more responsible, they say, to sell these things and give them to the poor?
I get this impulse - I really do. Indeed, there is something gone awry when a Christian communities spends a lot of its money on making sure its entertainment auditorium (excuse me, sanctuary!) looks up-to-date and all its musical equipment and video equipment and art work are the best that exist. "We're doing this for God," is their pat comment and it's a nearly impregnable comment, for who can argue against wanting to do something for God? Like the middle class visitors who are compared to the poor widow, churches that are comfortable and posh and fancy ought to consider whether they are "giving" to God out of their poverty or out of their relative abundance? We ought all be thinking of all the many other passages in Luke where Jesus talks about selling everything and giving to the poor, and the passages where Jesus talks about how "everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and everyone who humbles himself will be exalted" (18:9-14).
But if we skip too quickly to this question about how a church LOOKS, what its appearance is, relative to poverty, we skip over a couple of really important points in this passage and in the whole of the gospel.
The first point is that appearance really, really just doesn't matter all that much. "Not a stone will be left on stone." Whatever we have done - whether out of our abundance or our poverty - will matter not a jot. Jesus is at great pains to tell us about the paradox of appearances: what looks rich is not really rich. In this passage, Jesus warns us that when people come to say that "the time is here" and we reach for that out of a desperate attempt to find security, we will not, in fact, find security.
The second point is that is that Jesus cares far more that we not be deceived by appearances, and that we are not afraid of wars and insurrections. That's because the main point is not appearances but rather what we do with what we have been given. Today's second passage (Revelation 14:14-19) talks about how God will harvest us when the harvest is ready, but Jesus' point is that we cannot know by simple appearances when or how that will be.
I remember visiting an incredibly gold-laden church, filled to the brim with art by all the masters, in Italy. But what struck me most was how much of that gold and silver, how much of that art, was given by those who had very, very little to give. I think, too, of the stories of our own parish: how there were so-called "green Sundays" where people were requested to put only bills in the offering plate in order to raise enough money to build the church we currently have. Based on some of the stories I have heard, that money was, often as not, given out of need rather than abundance.
Who am I, then, to be so arrogant as to suggest that we sell off what my brothers and sisters in Christ from fifty or five hundred years ago so lovingly gave? How can I dare to suggest that that church in Italy should sell its Michelangelo to the wealthiest bidder, when at the moment, anyone at all, from the most destitute to the most wealthy, may wander in, gaze at that art, and see in it a witness to God's love?
Jesus' message to us is that figuring out who is "in" and who is "out" quite simply can't be done on the basis of appearances. Indeed, we will do best simply to try to follow God's commandment to love each other as best as we can, and avoid being taken in by appearances - whatever those appearances may be. God will be the one who does that. Today, let us pray for the grace to follow God in whatever guise God comes to us.
—Jana M. Bennett