We could do well to detect a note of defiance in our widow’s action. She may very well be one of those widows who lost out against clever scribes. If they’ve gone after her property like all the others (because she has no one to champion her cause, no husband) and she has put into the treasury all that she had to live on (as the Lord who reads hearts tells us), then we may have sight of a defiant widow.
In this case, she tells herself: “They might have gotten their greedy hands on everything else, but God gets these.” And as those two tiny coins go into the treasury, the entirety of her former life with her husband has gone. There only remain memories of her former married life. Remember, this isn’t a parable; this really happened. A widow put into the Temple treasury all she had to live on, and Jesus saw her do it.
The Lord knows a perfect offering when he sees one. As he sits and teaches now in the Temple, his mind is turning towards the sacrifice he himself will make on the cross. What makes for a perfect offering is when the offerer and the offering are the same. So, we say that Jesus made a perfect offering of himself because he offered his own Body and Blood to the Father in the sacrifice of the cross. No one took his life from him; he was free from beginning to end. Yet, he is the offerer and the offering. The liturgy gives us a neat phrase about this: as offerer and offering, Christ is priest and victim.
The old Temple never produced a perfect offering, not one. This is because the priest and victim were always different. There was the high priest, who would walk up into the Holy of Holies carrying a large bowl full of blood, but of a sacrificed animal. The offerer and offering were different. Sure, the offering symbolized the offerer. In that bowl was thought to be sorrow for sins, love of God, hope of life, resolution to do better, but only symbolically so.
But Christ made a perfect offering after he rose from the dead. Like the high priest, he too entered the divine presence, not a physical place on earth but heaven itself. The letter to the Hebrews is talking about the Ascension. And once ascended into heaven, standing before his Father forever, the Son of God offers his own Body and Blood. Offerer and offering are the same, a perfect sacrifice.
And because it is the sinless Body and purest Blood of the Son of God which is offered, there is indeed the forgiveness of sins, new love for God, hope of life bestowed, and grace to do better. The imperfect sacrifices of the old Temple never united priest and victim like that. Compared to the one, perfect sacrifice, they were all symbols and signs pointing to Christ at his Ascension into heaven.
Why that matters is seen in the terrible situation of our widow. If offerer and offering are not the same, then there is a divorce of what is holy from what is unholy. It leaves outside the holy place as unholy those for whom the sacrifice is offered. And unholy people, places, things, events are ripe for the picking. If offerer and offering are different, and unholy actions are the ones conducted far away from holy places, then unscrupulous and predatory scribes can sidle up to a widow in her grief and trick her. If offerer and offering are different, we ourselves can divorce our Sunday life from our weekday life: we display best behaviour at Church, but get away with whatever we can elsewhere.
Christ’s perfect sacrifice, in which offerer and offering are the same, calls me to make a similar offering of myself: every action of mine is also to be an offering made to God. We have to put ourselves in the same mode as the widow, not in her destitution but in her total self-entrustment to God and her integrity of life. Christ offered his Body and Blood, that is, everything, to the Father, and I who benefit from that sacrifice by being washed in that Blood and fed with his Body must do likewise: all of me for all of him.
So, we have to be on the look out for those parts of our daily life which are not appropriate for Church. We also have to be on the look out for those parts of our Church life which are too holy for our own good. Christ gave himself up for us as the perfect sacrifice to take our sins away. We imitate him in a perfect sacrifice of ourselves to God by entrusting our whole self to him and by integrity of life.
Fr Paul Rowse, OP Parish Priest
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