Monday of 34th week in course
Luke 21: 1-4; Daniel 1
The short passage we just received from Luke’s Gospel needs to be positioned properly. Taken by itself, it is a tribute to those who have nothing but give everything. Jesus would rightly consider his own mother to be like this poor widow—alone in the world except for her only son, and about to lose him only to gain the whole Church as her children. Mary, of course, gave everything she had to God when she first said, behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me as you have spoken. She did so knowing that giving everything to God was something that happened with all the truly great character's in Israel's history, like Daniel, who though a slave in Babylon, had a huge impact not only on the Jewish people, but on all Christian assemblies. He did it by committing everything to the Lord.
But to understand more fully this precious story, unique to St. Luke, we should consider what Jesus said three lines earlier. He, in the hearing of all the Jews, condemned the scribes—scholars of the Law—who like to go about in long robes and love salutations in the market and the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at feasts. Not for all that are they condemned, although pride goes before a fall. No, he condemned them precisely for neglecting the Law of love, the Law of justice, by foreclosing on the houses of widows. Oppressing widows and orphans is one of the crimes that the prophets say cries out to God for vengeance. So the wealth and criminal arrogance of the scribes is contrasted with the piety and self-giving of this little widow.
And right after this story we read about the almost idolatrous adulation of the crowds for the Temple of Herod, adorned with noble stones and offerings. This leads into the final discourse and prediction of the destruction of the Temple. Those who built the Temple, Herod, his successors, the lawyers and Sadducees—all of them professed devotion to God, but all of them engaged in unlawful activities and, worst of all, all of them rejected God’s Son, Jesus. Therefore the Temple, the center of what Luke considers idolatrous worship and criminal activity, had to come down. Therefore the Jewish people had to give up their privileged position so that all nations could be gathered together, so that widows could receive justice, and so that we might today gather around this altar of commemoration to remember and celebrate God’s servant, God’s Son, Christ our Passover.
