Readings of the day: 1 Kings 17:10-16; Psalm 146:7, 8-9, 9-10; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44
In the language of the Bible, there are few people depicted as poor and downtrodden as widows. From many different texts of the Old Testament, we have the oft-repeated triplet, “the widow, the orphan and the stranger (or resident alien),” which stands for the lowest of the low classes in the society of Israel of the time. We hear the widow-orphan-stranger motif in our Psalm today: “The LORD loves the righteous, and watches over the strangers. The LORD upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.”
Girls and women through Biblical times had few rights independently of their fathers and then their husbands, and children had few rights independently of their parents. So a child whose parents had died, or a woman who had lost her husband, would be extremely poor and excluded from the power structures of those ancient societies.
Can we not think of many examples when Jesus preferentially calls upon children, women, and sometimes widows; when he makes these underprivileged people the centre of the event? We hear a clear example of Jesus doing this in today’s Gospel, the story of the so-called “widow’s mite.” In fact, both Mark’s Gospel and our reading from 1 Kings today centre on the heroic widow figure. (And if we are thinking that the term “heroic widow” is self-contradictory, an oxymoron even to our ears today, that is because it is. Our Bible offers us this jarring image of the widow, the lowest of the low classes, who becomes the heroine; the main driver or protagonist of the event).
When I think of the widow’s mite, I think of one of my favourite paintings, one by the French painter James Tissot, called “The Widow’s Mite” or “Le denier de la veuve.” Tissot is known for his set of 365 distinctive watercolour (or gouache) paintings, which he painted late in his life and many of which are scenes from the Bible. But much of his earlier work is of well-dressed, wealthy, attractive women in the rich neighbourhood of Paris where Tissot lived. And then, one day, James Tissot visited Saint-Sulpice Church in Paris to paint a portrait of a choir singer. There, he experienced a vision of Jesus tending to the very poorest people, and soon he returned to a devout practice of his Catholic faith.
It strikes me (whether this is intentional on Tissot’s part or coincidence, I am not sure) how similar the temple treasury area in Tissot’s “The Widow’s Mite” looks to the limestone façades of Saint-Sulpice and many other churches in Paris. I lived within a fifteen-minute walk of Saint-Sulpice for five years in Paris. And the scene of people milling about the temple treasury in “The Widow’s Mite” reminds me of a frequent scene around the entrances to Saint-Sulpice and other churches in Paris: Well-dressed elites, but the (still) many poor people the elites have been almost conditioned to ignore.
But there is one person noticeably not shown in Tissot’s painting, “The Widow’s Mite.” That person is Jesus. Tissot is also famous for at least two (that I can think of) of his later watercolours that are from Jesus’ perspective. One is Tissot’s “Crucifixion, Seen from the Cross,” which is from the crucified Jesus’ view, looking down upon the crowds—closest to him, his mother, the women who served Jesus during his ministry, and the beloved disciple—at the foot of the cross. And the second of these paintings is “The Widow’s Mite.”
Midway through today’s Gospel reading, Mark says, fairly innocuously, that “Jesus sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury.” Tissot’s unseen Jesus paints the watercolour for us: A crowd of men in fine robes, the scribes Jesus has just criticized for their boastfulness, even in prayer, as “they devour widows’ houses.” This crowd is wealthy, proud, and self-serving. And in their midst is a poor widow, facing Jesus; facing the artist; facing us. Her eyes are downcast in a shamed gaze. She is carrying a small child, at least in Tissot’s painting. And the wealthy men continue to socialize; continue to boast of their wealth and status. One reaches for a horn, one of seven next to the temple treasury box that the wealthy would blow to announce that they had made a substantial donation. All these men ignore the poor widow, whom Tissot depicts as she walks away, after having dropped her “two small copper coins” in the treasury box. All ignore her, except the unseen but ever-present Jesus.
Jesus notices the poor widow. And he takes this opportunity to teach his disciples: Pay attention to the widow. Do not, in your pride, in your wealth, in any spirit of self-absorption that can even affect our prayer, ignore this widow and what she has just done! “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says to his disciples, “This poor widow has put in more than all of those who are contributing to the treasury.”
There is profound meaning in just these few words of our Lord. And, of course, we would be right in observing a recurring pattern of this kind of event—of encounter with the poor; the widow; the orphan; the stranger, resulting in a teaching moment—in our Bible. For good reason, our Church has us hear the Gospel account of the widow’s mite alongside our reading today from 1 Kings about the encounter between Elijah and a widow with a young son at Zerephath.
Understandably, the widow of Zerephath is focused on conserving what little food she has so she and her son will not starve. Yet, just then, Elijah asks this woman to be boldly generous—Elijah asks the widow, not the other way around, for “a little cake”! And somehow (1 Kings does not say why) the widow at Zerephath trusts Elijah. Maybe Elijah simply had that great a reputation as a prophet. Anyway, Elijah’s prophecy comes true: The jar of meal and the jug of oil last until the LORD sends rain to relieve the terrible famine in the land, which was disproportionately affecting the poorest people.
I think it is reasonable for us, when we hear about the widow at Zerephath in 1 Kings; the widow at the temple treasury in Mark’s Gospel, to focus on how each widow is exceedingly generous with very little, or on the trust each widow shows in God, directly or through a prophet like Elijah. But in each event, with each widow, there is more depth of meaning than generosity or trust. And, please allow me to say, the added depth of meaning has nothing to do with each widow’s starting lack of food or money. The focus, in either event, is not primarily on either widow but on the abundance of God.
The widow at Zerephath obeys Elijah and makes him “a little cake” from her meal and oil, and then she and her son receive more food by the word and hand of the LORD than they needed to survive until the rain ended Israel’s crop failure and famine. The widow at the temple treasury quite possibly gives the second greatest gift anybody gives in our Gospels. What do I mean by this?
It is helpful, I think, to place the event of the widow at the temple treasury and her “mite”—her two small copper coins—in its broader context within Mark’s Gospel. We are drawing toward the end of the Church’s liturgical year. By the way, Advent is only three weeks away; the beginning of a new Church year (just saying!). We have followed Mark’s Gospel roughly in order this year on Sundays. After this account of the widow’s mite, Mark includes only one more short chapter before Jesus enters Jerusalem, and his Passion and death take place. At the point where we hear from Mark today, the Pharisees and the scribes, the religious elites of Israel, are murderously angry with Jesus. Jesus continues to criticize them for their blindness to their worst sin, and they are on the cusp of having Jesus killed.
Jesus’ death on a cross is the first and most generous gift that anybody gives in our Gospels; in the whole of the Bible and of human history. In the immediate foreshadow of Jesus’ gift of his very life for our salvation is the gift of the widow and her two small copper coins, “everything she had” out of her poverty. A more historically distant sign, but still a sign, of God’s supreme generosity that culminates in Jesus’ gift of eternal life by his death on a cross is the gift of food of the widow at Zerephath to Elijah.
On the cross, God gave us in Christ “everything [he] had to live on” so that we might live forever. God invites us not to ignore this, but to imitate it by giving generously according to our means, as a sign that we, like the hidden but ever-present Jesus in the Gospel scene, the artist of our creation and our salvation, have taken notice.
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