6 June 2020
Saturday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time
All this week we have considered the Love of God, poured out upon the Church at Pentecost, and brought to the rest of the world through the same Church, the branches of the Vine bringing life to the rest of the vineyard. Today, at the end of this week, we witness an incredible display of love from the most unlikely source: a poor widow.
Jesus warns us of the scribes who go about wearing the appearance of loving God, but do not love God in their hearts; they fail to keep the Great Commandment to love God with their whole being, as God has loved them with His entire Self. In another place, Jesus says of them “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me…” (Matthew 15:8). They seek their reward in this life: greetings, honors, wealth, but what will they receive in the life to come? “They will receive a very severe condemnation.” Why? Is God angry that they did not love Him? No; God does not need our love. His feelings cannot be hurt by our callousness. Rather, Heaven is about entering into the very life of God, which is a perfect union of love. These scribes lived their lives and even their holy vocation loving only one person: themselves. They expended their efforts serving and pleasing only one person: themselves. They have shown God, by their actions and by their hearts, what that truly want, who they serve, who they love: themselves. And thus God grants them what they want for eternity: themselves, and thus they are permitted to walk that broad, smooth, downward-sloping road to the crushing isolation of Hell.
Then there is a widow who puts two small coins in the Temple treasury. The coins in and of themselves are almost worthless; it is quite likely she was saving them for her burial, as there was the custom of placing two coins on the eyes of the dead as a simple payment to the gravedigger. Now she could not even afford her own burial; benefactors or family members will have to do so. But her love of God and her love of His Temple is such that she makes this tremendous sacrifice, offering the last of her wealth for the greater glory of God. The rich gave to the Temple from their surplus: after they spent their money on the things they wanted and needed, they gave to the Temple what was leftover, giving from their pocket, rather than their heart. The widow, on the other hand, loved God more than her own life, and in her Jesus saw a heart after His own Heart and the Son of God, seeing in secret, rewards her with His praise (Matthew 6:4).
Let us love God as this widow does, recalling constantly to mind the generosity of God and all He has done for us. Is there any limit to what we ought to give Him in return? How can we withhold anything for ourselves, when all that we have comes to us from Him? And it is not as though He demands our money; certainly we must do what we can to provide for His “Temple”, the Church. But He asks only one thing of us: us. He asks us to give Him what the scribes refused to give, and He asks us to give our whole selves to Him in love’s freedom not because He needs us, but because it is only by this do we come into the fullness of life in Heaven. Only by this is the sin of Adam and Eve utterly undone, only by this is death and sin defeated in us, when our hearts become conformed to Christ, who loves the Father and gives His whole Self to Him in love. Love inspires generosity, least of all regarding our earthly goods but above all the good of our own selves; let us love, then, our God, who has kept nothing of Himself to Himself, but in our Baptism poured out His Fatherly love upon us, making us His Children, who in His Son gave His entire Self upon the Cross, and Who at Pentecost poured even His Spirit upon the Earth. We will never match God’s generosity by our own love, but He does not demand that we do; He only demands that we try.