The Poor Widow at the Temple

Monday,
November 25, 2019
St. Catherine
of Alexandria
1st Reading:
Dn 1:1-6, 8-20
Gospel: Lk 21:1-4
Jesus looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasure box; he also saw a poor wi-dow dropping in two small coins. And he said, “Truly, I tell you, this poor widow put in more than all of them. For all gave an offering from their plenty, but she, out of her poverty, gave all she had to live on.”
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)
Stories like today’s Gospel remind me of an experience at a northern town of Cebu where I spent some years of childhood. Being a sugarcane municipality then, the difference between rich and poor was glaring as rigid economic lines were drawn between landowners and sugarcane field workers. Religion failed to topple down the barrier. On the contrary religion even looked the other way, so to speak, as the rich threw their weights around at Eucharistic celebrations. They had their family names etched on special pews in the church and nobody was supposed to use those pews even in their absence.
Too young to understand this unwritten law I occupied one of them at one Sunday Mass. I was kneeling in childlike devotion when suddenly an old lady with Imeldific hairdo tapped my shoulder with her fan and directed my attention to her name etched on the pew. That incident was a pole apart from my experience with another rich family which did not drive me away. At offertory time they even gave me some coins to drop into the collection basket.
These two experiences triggered these insights. First: the rich can be so vi-sible in the church yet so blind to God’s presence in the poor. Reasons for such visibility vary. Some associate themselves with the Church to compensate for the cheatings they do in business, while others do so because in the Church they can freely exercise their superiority.
Second: not all rich people look down upon the poor. Many, in fact, follow the Gospel advice of using earthly treasures to help a lot of people live decent lives.
Third: when a rich person gives some coins to the poor to drop into the collection basket, he does as the widow of today’s Gospel did. According to Jesus, “the widow, out of her poverty, gave all she had to live on.” That family was obviously richer than the widow. But the story of the widow is not about mathematics but about what lies in the heart. The hearts of the members of that fa-mily must have been poor because they readily resona-ted with the heart of that poor boy who strayed into their reserved seat.
Today’s Gospel confronts us with this question: With whom does our heartbeat resonate?- (Atty.) Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., J.D., D.M.