Jesus told us clearly what the first and greatest commandment is, the most important thing we have to do in life: to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. Love, as we know, is more than merely words and feelings, but is seen in deeds. Love is choosing to act for the good of another, sacrificing oneself for sake of someone or something else.
After Jesus had finished His "formal" teaching in the courtyard of the Temple of Jerusalem, He began to "people-watch" in order to continue to instruct His Apostles about how to put what He taught into action. They saw the stream of people putting money in the temple treasury, which was a large trumpet-shaped receptacle leading to a secure money box. People would put their coins in the horn at the top, which was like a funnel, and then the sound of the coin would resonate as it rolled down the metal tubing into the box. Many rich people, St. vMark tells us, were putting in large sums and "making a lot of noise" on the treasury trumpet.
But then a poor widow came and put in two lepta, two small coins which together were worth about a penny and likely barely made a sound. Then Jesus gave a surprising lesson that obviously the disciples never forgot. Jesus praised the poor widow rather than all the rest, saying that she had contributed more than all them, for they "gave out of their surplus, but she gave everything she had, all she had to live on." This widow, because of her poverty, could easily have been excused for giving nothing. She could have easily chosen to drop into the trumpet only one of the coins and kept the other for herself. But she didn't. She gave it all. And her generosity was praised by Jesus and will remain until the end of time.
What could have moved her to give to the temple even what she needed to survive? There's only one reason: her deep faith. She believed not simply that God exists, or that He had worked various miracles in the past to help her people. She believed so much in Him and was so convinced of the importance of what was going on in God's house that she wanted to dedicate her life and all her goods to continuing and expanding that work of salvation. She accounted the continuance and expansion of that work even more than her own life. That was her faith – and it is this faith, rather than the fact she was a widow, that links her to another widow, in Zarephath, who used all she and her son had to survive in order to feed Elijah the prophet. She had faith in God and therefore trusted in the prophet God had sent, sacrificing her last food and drink in order to feed the prophet.
God rewarded her generosity by making the little oil and flour miraculously last for a year in order to save both her and her son as well as Elijah through a brutal famine. The lesson is that we save our lives not by grasping to hold on to what we have, but by sacrificing it out of love for others. It is only when we die to ourselves so that others may live that we ourselves survive.
We have to note, with a sense of shame and regret, that most Catholics in the United States cannot be honestly called generous like those widows. Many, in fact, are downright cheap with God. The average Catholic adult in the United States gives 0.7% of his or her annual income to the Church – less than one percent, which equals about $122.59 a year, or $2.36 a week. The average Catholic household (all the members in a home combined) gives 1.4% to the Church. This is one-third to one-half of what Protestants give to their churches. And Catholics in the northeast – where there is far more education and in general a higher-standard of living – are by far the least generous of all Catholics in our country, giving about one-third less than our brothers and sisters do in every other part of the nation, including areas where most of the Mass-goers are recent immigrants.
This is not just an economic problem for the Catholic Church but a moral problem, because, as the economists tell us, how we spend our money is a sign of what we value. These figures show us that many Catholics just do not value the mission of the Church enough to sacrifice much to continue and expand it. To take just one example, if a Catholic is spending more each month on cable television than he or she is giving to the Church, then that person simply thinks that having more television channels at one's fingertips is more important than advancing the mission of the Church. Most of us, I think, would be embarrassed to leave a waitress a $2.36 tip at an inexpensive restaurant, yet fifty percent of Catholics seemingly without shame give that or less to the work of God each week. The small value and priority that many Catholics, by their economic choices, give to the mission of the Church is one of the principal reasons why the Church in the United States is suffering.
Not only does the Church as a whole suffer from this lack of generous stewardship, but those who give little suffer spiritually as individuals, too. Jesus tells us in the Gospel that "the measure with which we measure will be measured back to us" (Lk 6:38). In other words, if we give generously, we will receive generously; if we give sparingly, we will receive sparingly (see 2 Cor 9:6). This is not because God withholds His graces from the stingy, but because the human heart is a two-way street. If a person's heart is open and generous, then it is capable of receiving from God the blessings He wishes to give. If it is tight and miserly, on the other hand, then very little of God's grace will be able to penetrate it.
In Jesus' calling us to give not just what is extra but what is essential, not just what is left but what is right, He's merely telling us to love as He has loved us, all the way, holding nothing back. He gave His life in exchange for ours, valuing us more than He valued Himself. Let us ask Him to make us as generous as He is, to open our hearts fully to the gift of His grace, to help us to love Him with all our mind, heart, soul, strength and possessions, so that we might experience His happiness in this world and live forever with Him in the next.
