The Widow's Might

The story of the Widow's Mite (Mk 12:41-55 and Lk 21:1-4) has received little attention in general. Scholarly articles on the passage tend to focus on the coins in the story or extra-biblical parallels, or how Jesus was able to know her financial situation from afar. The main point of the text gets relatively attention in the journals, perhaps because it's thought to be obvious.

When you turn to commentaries, you find a vast range of restatements of two main theories: (a) What counts isn't how much you give, but how much you have left (e.g. Marshall); or (b) What counts is the attitude of the heart--a non-trite version of "it's the thought that counts" (e.g. Calvin).

Both of these are surely true statements, though it's hard to support the second from the text since we can't read the widow's mind. Certainly, though, Jesus applauds her willingness to give all.

The more you think about her sacrifice, though, the less well it sits. Women in first-century Palestine got the short end of the stick in almost every way: They were restricted in their roles because they were seen to be inferior physically and mentally, and even to be responsible for most sin. One daily prayer regimen had men thanking God each day for not being born women. In addition, this woman is poor, and widowed. A woman's legal status depended on her relatives, so being without a husband left her in an unprotected state, to say the least.

So if she's giving money to the collection, who is it for? Can there be anyone who needs those two coins more than she?

Jesus takes great pains elsewhere to point out, as Lord of the Sabbath, that the Sabbath was made for people, not the other way around. Similarly, in Mark 7:10-13 he condemns a practice called "Corban," wherein you could abandon obligations to your parents so long as the money went instead to the temple coffers. The widow's gift is a very close parallel to that--her very living is being given away when she can ill spare it.

The key to this paradox comes from the context (Wright, 1982). This story appears in both Mark and Luke, and in both cases it comes after a condemnation of the Scribes--who love ostentation and take advantage of the poor--and before a prediction of the destruction of the temple and the religious authorities it represents.

The widow's sacrifice is said to be superior to all others in magnitude--"this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others"--but Jesus isn't lauding the sacrifice itself. In fact, it is an object lesson. Having just condemned the Scribes for "devouring widow's houses" (Mk 12:40), he points to where this is happening in front of their very eyes. As Addison Wright points out,

Jesus' saying is not a penetrating insight on the measuring of gifts; it is a lament, "Amen, I tell you, she gave more than all the others." Or, as we would say: "One could easily fail to notice it, but there is the tragedy of the day-she put in her whole living." She had been taught and encouraged by religious leaders to donate as she does, and Jesus condemns the value system that motivates her action, and he condemns the people who conditioned her to do it.

We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We learn both from what the widow is doing and what is being done to her. Any religious system which can consume its weakest and most vulnerable for fuel deserves to meet with the same fate as the temple did in AD 70.

It is tempting to bring up Father Arturo Uribe, who in seminary fathered a child, and later as a priest successfully argued in court that he shouldn't have to pay child support because of his vow of poverty. Or to learn from the mixed feelings of a father whose two daughters decided to give their careers to take holy orders.

We need to look a little closer to home. This passage warns us that not all judgment waits for the end of time. In AD 70 the temple met its fate, and later in Rev 2:5 Jesus warned the Ephesian church, "If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place."

If Jesus hadn't pointed her out, the disciples would never have noticed the widow. How are the marginalized in our church, the people we barely see, faring?

[Refs: The image is The Widow's Mite (Le denier de la veuve) by James Tissout, from the Brooklyn Museum; On women in the first century: Green, Joel B., McKnight, Scot; Marshall, I. Howard: Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (IVP, 1992) p. 880; Addison Wright, "The Widow's Mites: Praise or Lament?-A Matter of Context," Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 44, 256 (1982); Calvin: Commentary on Matthew, Mark, Luke - Volume 3.]

Fun Fact:

The widow's "mite" of Mk 12:42 is, in the Greek, the lepton, the smallest of the Roman coins. The term "lepton" is also used for a class of elementary particles containing some of the smallest particles, including the nearly massless neutrino. Neutrinos, while numerous, are so nearly "invisible"-interacting weakly with the universe around them-that it's been estimated more than 50 trillion neutrinos generated by our sun pass quietly through the human body every second.

There is a time, though, when neutrinos take center stage: during the collapse of a star in a supernova, a cataclysmic event where a single star can outshine an entire galaxy. A flood of neutrinos out of the dying star bears away most of the energy of this collapse, an effect which provides an early warning system; the neutrinos from Supernova 1987A, for instance, were detected three hours before the photons.