The Widow's MIGHT (32.B)

The Gospel we just heard is known throughout the English-speaking world as the story of the widow’s mite. That’s how the King James Bible translates the word Jesus used.

A mite was a medieval Dutch or Flemish coin worth very little. The coin the woman donated to the Temple was a lepton, a word meaning small or thin. It was so tiny there was trouble stamping the face of it.

Our translation just says that the woman put in two small copper coins, worth about half a modern cent each. That’s all we need to know. By almost any measure, her gift was insignificant.

This famous story can teach us important lessons about almsgiving, about generosity, and about Christian stewardship. But not today.

Today, I think, the message is about faith and trust.

 In the words of one commentary, this story is not about “big money and small coins.”  [Days of the Lord, vol. 5, p. 294]

We can’t miss that if we look at the Gospel alongside our first reading. Of course, the widow who helps Elijah is generous. But it can’t just be generosity and hospitality that leads her to risk her life to feed the prophet. And generosity can’t explain the second widow giving all she had to live on to the Temple treasury.

What’s more, the two widows aren’t the only ones in today’s readings showing great faith and trust. Look at Elijah: the backstory here is that the prophet is in deep trouble. He’s made an enemy of the evil queen Jezebel; he’s the one who prophesied the drought of which he’s now a victim. And Jezebel is busily slaughtering all the prophets she can lay her hands on.

So what does the Lord do? He sends Elijah to Zarephath, in a region governed by Jezebel’s father, who hates him as much as she does. And God tells him to seek help from a widow, surely the poorest person in town.

What does Elijah do? Exactly what the Lord tells him. So this story begins and ends in faith and trust in God.

The widow of Zarephath shows even more faith than the prophet does. “Elijah, of course, believed in the Lord,” who had spoken to him and given proof of divine power. “But this woman was a pagan.” [Days of the Lord, vol. 5, p. 290]

Yet she puts her faith in a stranger, and in the God of Israel.

Again, I don’t want to minimize the widow’s generosity. But what is that compared to her belief in the word of hope that Elijah speaks to her?

The same is true of the widow in the Gospel. She entrusts herself completely to the Lord’s care, doing something that makes no sense humanly speaking.

I wonder what I would do if a parishioner wanted to donate every last dollar they had to the parish. Actually, I don’t wonder. I would call a social worker and tear up the cheque.

But that’s back to human thinking, when the Gospel is really asking us to think like Christ, as St. Paul urges the Philippians (2:5).

How can we have the kind of faith and trust in God that these two poor widows showed? We’ve had an answer at Mass for the last five weeks, as we read from the Letter to the Hebrews every Sunday.

At the start of October, Hebrews reminded us that the suffering Lord calls us his brothers and sisters. A week later we heard the magnificent passage that states that the word of God—the very Scriptures we hear at Mass—is living and active. It has power to shape our hearts.

On October 17, we were called to boldness, “so that we may receive mercy and grace to help in time of need.” Those two widows did not place their trust in God without his help.

The readings for the next two weeks emphasized Christ’s self-offering, his priestly office in which we are called to share.

Today, the Letter to the Hebrews proclaims that Christ will come again, bringing salvation. This is the hope that God placed in the hearts of two poor widows who did not even know the Lord directly.

One was a pagan, the other a Jew, yet they had faith that “the present form of this world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:31)

How much more are we Christians called to trust God in every circumstance, to be mindful that our earthly concerns—financial, medical, educational—are secondary to our relationship of trust with the Lord who today’s psalm tells us “keeps faith forever, who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry.”

I just got back last night from a retreat at Mount Angel Abbey, where the bulletin board announced the title of today’s homily in the monastery. It was "the widow’s might." M-I-G-H-T. That wasn't a spelling mistake, but a reminder of where those brave women found their strength: only in God.

As we approach our parish feast day, the Solemnity of Christ the King, we might well ask God for that same strength in our lives, the gift of greater faith in the Lord, who “will reign forever.”