Whole-Hearted Love
November 7, 2021: A Reflection for the 32nd Sunday of O.T., Year B
Mark 12:38-44
“This poor widow has given more than all the others.” (Mk 12:43)
If ever we wondered what whole-hearted love looked like, today’s Gospel of the poor widow offers us a glimpse. Leaving aside the question of whether it was prudent to give away the last two coins which formed her sustenance, what must have caught the eye of Jesus was a love of God which gave everything. For the widow, it was what she had to live on. She felt the pinch of what it was like to give God everything. In contrast, others had given out of their abundance. It was certainly laudable, and truly more prudent, but Jesus’ observation went to the heart and this woman’s complete gift of self in the form of those two coins did not go by unnoticed by him.
Jesus, it is no easy thing to give to you of our sustenance. Not the sustenance of external things alone, but the deeper parts of ourselves where whole-hearted love of you is shown in what we do, how we live, how we relate to others. So many opportunities you offer us each day to let go of that part of us which resists trusting you when what you ask us to give you is our last interior penny. And we wonder, sometimes, if you will be enough when our hands are empty of coins. Yet what you give when we let go is so much more than we could ever imagine. Why does it have to be so hard sometimes?
Yet your invitation is there: “Give me what you can of yourself.” You are more than pleased when we try. And to try is all you ask. In that very moment when we put ourselves aside long enough to even take a baby step, we become as the poor widow who let the two coins slip quietly from her hands into the treasury of your heart and the Kingdom of Heaven.