The widow’s mite

MARK 12:35-45 | 10 NOVEMBER 2024 

 Though what the widow in this gospel gave to the Temple treasury was “everything she had to live on”, in purely monetary terms it was next to nothing. A lepton (λεπτό) was the smallest monetary denomination in circulation, the equivalent of a farthing in old money, what a poorly paid labourer would earn in one day. But precisely because it was everything she had to live on, it was an infinitely larger offering than anything that might have been donated by a rich person able to give from their surplus. So it is that the episode of the Widow’s Mite has been read as a parable of generosity, foreshadowing Jesus’ own total generosity on the Cross. 

But the immediate context suggests another dimension to this familiar, affecting story. Jesus certainly praises the impoverished widow for her generosity, but the story is recounted as part of a searing attack on the tribute system that maintained the Temple aimed especially at those who benefitted financially from the system, in this instance, the Scribes. The Temple was indeed the sanctuary of God’s presence, but the system surrounding it had been turned into a highly lucrative enterprise. 

This story is told, then, to illustrate the corruption that had overtaken the religious establishment. The Scribes, who at the beginning of this gospel passage, are excoriated by Jesus for their hypocrisy in publicly parading their devotion, while surreptitiously swallowing up the property of poor widows in private, stand accused of corruption and greed in taking money from those who could least afford it. 

The Scribes, of course, are usually yoked in the gospels with the Pharisees as enemies of Jesus. From their joint point of view, Jesus was a threat not just to their authority and standing, but also to their financial interests. Just as the Chief Priests had done before them, they had worked out that if Jesus was not dealt with – and soon – not only would he expose their exploitative practices before the people, but also dangerously stir up trouble for them with the Roman authorities. 

And they were right to be nervous: Jesus was most certainly exposing not only the scandal of their shameless self-promotion, thinly veiled by sickening ostentation, but also the fact that they were at the same time callously taking advantage of those less fortunate than themselves: they were, as we might say, ‘on the make’. Widows, remember, were among the most vulnerable people in society, having no legal rights whatever and completely dependent on charity. That’s why the Jewish Law singled them out, along with the orphan and the stranger, for special care and sympathy. Little wonder, then, that this is one of the few instances in the gospel when Jesus is shown to be furious. And how could he not be? Aquinas says that it is the mark of a good person to be angered by injustice. 

The story of the widow’s mite, then, turns out to be yet another warning about the perils and pitfalls of institutional religion, perennially prone to focus on externals alone, while forgetting that love of God and neighbour are, as made clear in last week’s gospel, the essence of the Law and its first priority. The widow is praised for her generosity: but she’s also pitied as the victim of an institution which was intended to liberate and enhance life, but which had become an oppressive and overbearing burden to the weak and vulnerable and a gravy train for the self-seeking and wealthy. No surprise, then, that within days of this episode, this same corrupt institution would collude with the military might of Rome, through the agency of its venal provincial governor, Pontius Pilate, to rid itself of the troublemaker from the north. 

Of course, the corrupt institution that killed Jesus wasn’t uniquely corrupt; all human institutions are prone to corruption, precisely because they’re human. We all share in a nature that is fallen, flawed, skewed and off-balance. Not totally corrupt, as classical Protestantism holds, but certainly damaged and, as a result, often damaging. 

The Church, though in its essence a divine institution, that is, Christ’s Body, nevertheless is, in its human elements – in us, that is – just as prone to corruption as any human institution. That has been the case from the very beginning into the present day; anybody who doubts that has read neither any history nor a newspaper. It never was in the past and it won’t ever be in the future immune from corruption. The holiness of the Church, which is one of its defining marks –“one, holy, Catholic, apostolic”, as the Creed has it – does not exclude failure and weakness in its human members. The apostles themselves, in no one better illustrated than Peter himself, were fallible, fear-filled, and flawed human beings. 

Affirming the holiness of the Church in the face of so much that seems so patently unholy is, and always will be, of course, an act of faith, rooted in our Catholic conviction that the Church is Christ’s Mystical Body. We, its members – members as in a body, not a club – don’t constitute it but are incorporated into it or, more accurately, into Him. 

There is, however, one point at which the holiness of the Church, the holiness of Christ, that is, is unambiguously (if not always decorously) present, namely, in the sacraments, and nowhere more explicitly than in the Mass. The reality of Christ’s presence in the sacraments is unaffected by the unworthiness of any of its participants, including the ordained participants. The fruitfulness of the sacraments in us certainly requires the right disposition on our part, but Christ’s efficacious presence in them is ex opere operato, that is, ‘on the basis of the [sacramental] act itself.’ 
There have been many descriptions or ‘models’ of the Church: the Pilgrim People of God, the Universal Sacrament of Salvation, the Mystical Body of Christ. But one Latin American theologian, the late Jesuit, Juan Luis Segundo, once described the Church as, first and foremost, “an undreamed-of possibility of love”.1 That description has the great advantage of challenging each one of us with the responsibility to realise in our own lives, at home, in the workplace, in the nation, in the world, this “undreamed-of possibility of love”. Christ’s love is made real in the world only if it is real in us. 

1. Juan Luis Segundo, The Community Called Church, Orbis 1973, pp. 82-83; cited in Richard Lennan, Risking the Church: The Challenge of Catholic Faith, OUP 2004, p.53.