BILLTESKA

Her whole living ~ all she had to live on ~ in other words, her very life. It would be nice to think that Jesus helped the old woman out, the way Elijah did. That, like the other widow, who fed the Prophet during the famine, her flour jar and oil jug would remain miraculously undiminished. But we don’t know that. She might well have gone home (if she had a home) and starved to death. She probably did. Yet, in saying that “she starved to death,” we reveal our own lack of faith. Clearly, if we really believe what we say we believe, this desperately poor widow ~ and countless like her ~ are the most exalted in God’s Kingdom. The last shall be first and the first last. If she died of starvation, she starved to life, not to death! It is the greedy and tight-fisted who starve to death, including those who give, but only out of their abundance in a calculating, prudential way, reckoning carefully so that their giving doesn’t hurt.


The Church has long-since adopted the list of classical virtues: justice, temperance, fortitude, prudence. But it is hard to find any endorsement for prudence in the gospels. From the rich young man who went away sorrowful because he had much, to the unprofitable servant who hid his talent and returned it intact but without increase, to today’s reckless widow, the Gospel seems to scorn prudence. The widow seems to be anything but prudent. Jesus Christ Himself was anything but prudent, and He did not encourage prudence in His closest disciples. The highest levels of spiritual stardom are not for the prudent, but for the daring, the daring and the reckless, for those who are not counting.

Having said this, I immediately feel the need to equivocate. Material recklessness may not be everyone’s calling, though spiritual recklessness probably is. It’s fine to give up everything and follow Jesus, but even Jesus did not call on everyone to do so. His advice to that young man was advice to that particular young man, and may not have been intended as a general command: Go and sell all that you have and give it to the poor, and follow Me. After all, many of the people He encountered He sent away from following Him ~ not that He condemned them, but neither did He call them. Sometimes, they followed Him anyway, mostly not. Most of those who heard and trusted Him did not follow Him on the road. We are so used to thinking of following Jesus on the way as a metaphor for being a Christian that we err by thinking one size fits all, when it comes to discipleship. We forget about Joseph of Arimathæa and Nicodemus and Simon the Leper and the other Pharisees and rich people of whom Jesus approved ~ none of whom He called to the widow’s kind of recklessness. He approved of her ~ apparently. At least He observed that her gift was greater than the much larger gifts of the abundantly rich; but He did NOT say, now all of you who would be My disciples, go and do likewise.

It is not everybody’s calling. One size does NOT fit all, when it comes to the path of sanctification. Spiritual recklessness may be for everybody, but maybe not necessarily material recklessness. Some must remain householders, not abandoning their families as the inner circle of disciples did. Some must pour out their lives in self-sacrifice for others in less spectacular ways. Some must exercise a certain kind of prudence, and constantly draw the fine distinction between prudence and faithlessness. Some unfortunate ones must even be rulers and possess power and wealth, in the most perilous of spiritual vocations, making the almost impossibly difficult distinction between the exercise of power and attachment to it. Put not your trust in princes, for rich and powerful saints have been known, but they are the rarest of jewels, and the percentage of rulers who were ever saints is extremely small. Camels and needles’ eyes ~ but NOT impossible, with God.

The widow’s recklessness is the most direct route to sanctity (to being like Jesus, in the words of today’s Collect), She put in all she had to live on. She was willing to risk her life. That is the important part. The rich prince, too, may be willing to lose his life, he may in fact be spiritually reckless, but power and possession are so seductive that nothing is more difficult. In a way, it is easier to be an anchorite in the desert. On the other hand, it is also possible for the very poor to be calculating and avaricious. The widow may have been thinking to herself Well, God, here’s all I have. See how much better I am than all those rich scribes and Pharisees! She may have been proud of her poverty (the bitch!); we also don’t know about that. Jesus didn’t say, He only observed that on the Marxist standard of relativity (from each according to his ability), she had given everything ~ 100%, which made her gift greater than the others according to our Lord. We have to read His approval of her inner state into the text.

But it may not be mere sentimentality to observe that the poor are usually more generous and less greedy than the rich. Statistically, that seems to be true. In our sad, declining society, the richer you are, the smaller the percentage of your wealth do you give away. Like the widow, the poor give the highest percentage. And one constantly hears of remarkable generosity observed among the homeless. Those who have nothing often have little sense of ownership or attachment to possessions. To those who have much, more shall be given; and from those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have. A hard saying, unless it be understood contrarily, as a curse upon those who have, since more possession means greater spiritual difficulty, while the poor losing even what little they have may turn out to be the greatest of blessings in the topsy-turvy world of the Reign of God.

Now, I didn’t intend this as a stewardship sermon, when I started out; but if you want to take it as such, feel free. Give wherever you like, but the more you give, the better off you will be. Not just in the next life, but right away. There is something strange and unexpected that happens when you give more than you can really afford ~ when you give till it hurts, as Teresa of Calcutta advised: you find that it hurts only in prospect. In the act, it turns out to be a joy ~ an unexpected joy. That is because you are made in the image of God, and God is, above all, a Giver, Who GAVE His only-Begotten Son. That is a way of saying that God gives more than He ought to, imprudently, recklessly. And when we do the same, we come into sync with who we really are and we have the joy of fulfilling our true purpose. A little bit of recklessness, a little bit of spiritual daring leading to significant material generosity can go a long way in terms of spiritual return. Mere giving by itself, without spiritual recklessness won’t get us very far, unless habitual giving trains us away from attachment. But giving more than we really should can produce miracles: inexhaustible flour-jars and oil-jugs.

The scribes and Pharisees, having made their gifts out of abundance, went home that day as anxious as ever. The widow went home ~ I like to think ~ filled with joy, singing and laughing. The hungry filled with good things; the rich sent empty away.

AMEN

MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!

# posted by billteska : 2:33 PM