Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 Kings 17:10-16 - Ps. 146:7,8-9,9-10 - Hebrews 9:24-28 - Mark 12:38-44
Today we witness two widows sacrificing all, and in between, the image of Jesus as High Priest bringing about Cosmic Transformation through his own sacrifice.
In our first reading from the book of Kings, we meet the Prophet Elijah as he is in flight from King Ahab and the Phoenician cult that Ahab has embraced with his wife, Jezebel. This cult, which worships the Storm God Baal, threatens the culture of Israel. Elijah has prophesied God’s infliction of a punishing drought in response to this apostasy, and it is this very drought that afflicts the Phoenician widow and her son, who ultimately provide Elijah with hospitality.
When Elijah comes upon the widow, exhausted and hungry from his travels, and asks for a cup of water and cake of bread, she declares she has only enough flour and oil to make a final meal for herself and her son, after which they will die. When Elijah urges her to first make him a little cake and promises that her jar of flour will not go empty, nor her jug of oil go dry, until God again brings rain, she does as he asks. She does this with no guarantee that the prophecy is true, no guarantee that there will actually be something left to prepare for her son and herself! An amazing act of trust, or should I say faith? She references Elijah’s God and seems here to put faith in this God, who is not her own. Her faith and trust bear fruit, as her flour and oil were indeed supplied by God for the coming year, during which she continued to feed Elijah along with her son and herself. (As one biblical scholar puts it, “an unlikely trio!”)
In Mark’s Gospel, we encounter another poor widow, this one in the synagogue. Jesus has been berating the scribes for their public show of religiosity, when he turns his attention to the “collection,” where the wealthy are ostentatiously giving to the treasury, while a poor widow humbly contributes two small coins out of her poverty. Jesus notes that she “has contributed all that she had, her whole livelihood.”
The widow in the first reading, who essentially gives all to Elijah, is rewarded with the endless supply of flour and oil through the drought and ultimately with the life restoring rain at the end of the year. We don’t know what the widow in Mark’s Gospel’s reward was or if there was any reward at all. She was destitute, and Jesus was commending her generosity amid destitution while critiquing the behavior of the scribes who gave out of their abundance.
What can we take away from this? For a while now, there has been talk in spiritual circles about the contrast between living out of a sense of scarcity vs. living out of a sense of abundance. The scribes had an abundance in material terms, out of which they contributed only judiciously. But perhaps their spirituality was really one of scarcity, a sense that they had to hold back what they wanted (not necessarily needed) for themselves. The widow, however, seemed to operate out of a spirituality of abundance despite her existential experience of scarcity. She gave what she had. What Jesus is doing is critiquing the hypocrisy of the scribes while commending the widow’s selflessness. Part of his critique of the scribes is the way in which they extort the vulnerable, including widows, strangers/aliens, and the poor. So, we should not see in this story an injunction to give away what you need for your own survival but rather a critique of those who demand such sacrifice.
The sacrifice of the widow in Mark’s Gospel, who receives no reward that we know of, brings us to the sacrifice of Jesus in the second reading from Hebrews, the sacrifice that brings about cosmic transformation. The widow’s sacrifice amid suffering and oppression evokes the sacrifice and suffering of so many in our world that goes unrecognized, unrewarded, unconsoled. What becomes of it? The sacrifice of victims of violence, the sacrifice of martyrs for truth and justice: What becomes of it? We believe that these sacrifices and sufferings are caught up in the sacrifice and suffering of Jesus, whose death and resurrection bring about a Cosmic Transformation. In a Cosmic Theology, all that seems to have been lost, all that seems to have been for naught, is gathered up, transformed, and garnered into the substance of Eternal Life, that unimaginable Resurrected Life that awaits us and all of God’s Creation.
Sr. Kathleen McManus, OP
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