11/11 - 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dear Parish Family,

We live in a ‘celebration of celebrity’s culture’. The TV shows, Magazines and Internet give huge space to even unimportant happenings that happen in celebrity lives. Jesus singles out a widow for honor. Poor as she is, she is giving from the little she has in order to help those who are needier than she is. Jesus praises her and points her out as an exemplar of goodness. To be praised by Jesus is to be honored indeed! Imagine over a billion people listening to this story on this Sunday. We do not know her name and her other accomplishments. This again is special, as we ourselves could step into this ‘holy space of limelight’. So how did that widow get this singular honor? The first thing to notice about her is that she wasn’t striving for honor, as the scribes were. Although Jesus noticed her, she wasn’t trying to get noticed.

Two copper coins could buy someone a scone of bread. The widow throws her last two coins into the Temple treasury so that someone, a nameless face would be helped by her generosity and she stared into certain hunger for the day. She knows that the God who provides would meet her needs. This is a daring feat of trust. The First Reading presents another widow with similar rock-faced trust in God, as she bakes bread for a man of God with the last measure of flour that she has. We know the ending of this story, as she had a miracle supply of oil and flour every day of the remaining time of famine.
From a faith perspective, we must never idealize poverty and see wealth as a bad thing in itself. God is rich, not poor, and heaven will not be a place of poverty. Poverty is something to be overcome, eradicated. The poor don't enjoy being poor. We must avoid too-quickly politicizing both poverty and wealth. Our lens must always be moral rather than political, though obviously both wealth and poverty have huge political implications. Before attacking the possession of wealth, we must ensure that we are free from embittered moralizing which, whatever its moral guise, is little more than envy.

Underlying everything else, we must always keep in mind Jesus' warning that the possession of wealth is dangerous, that it is hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Moreover that warning should be a huge aid in helping us to accept some other principles: First: The possession of wealth is not a bad thing of itself; it is how we use it and what it can do to our hearts that can be bad. Jesus makes a distinction between the generous rich and the miserly rich. The former are good because they imitate God, the latter are bad. When we are generous, particularly in a very prodigious way, riches won't close our hearts. But the reverse is also true. All miserliness, all stinginess, all lack of generosity closes our hearts in ways that make it hard to enter the kingdom of heaven, or genuine human community to put in purely human terms. The generous rich can inherit the kingdom, the miserly rich cannot. The poor are everyone's ticket into heaven—and to human health.

It is for all of us to get into the mind-set of the spiritually motivated widows of the Scripture readings: What we have is not our own, it's given to us in trust. God is the sole owner of all that is and the world properly belongs to everyone. What we claim as our own, private property, is what has been given to us in trust, to steward for the good of everyone. It's not really ours. This spiritual principle makes these women in great need instinctively respond by releasing their own control of things. This is the root meaning of trust. When the chips are down, let go and let God!

Fr. Tom Kunnel. C.O.