Giving Life By Sharing our Living with Others

Dear Friend,

In this week’s Gospel Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem and we see him debating with the religious leaders whose plots will soon culminate in Jesus’s arrest. (The Feast of Christ the King is coming soon!)

The work of scholar Luke Timothy Johnson has been helpful to me in reviewing this section of Luke’s Gospel. In the series Sacra Pagina, he writes:

“In these controversies we see in Jesus’s opponents an understanding of life before God as consisting only in this present earthly existence with no hope for a blessed resurrection, and with God’s blessings for the righteous being spelled out in terms of earthly prosperity, long life, and children, an understanding rooted in a conviction that God’s revelation is closed once for all in a book.”  

“Against such a perception, we find the words of Jesus expressing the deepest convictions of the Christian community concerning its understanding of the kingdom of God. God owns “all things” and “all things” must be given back to God … God is infinitely rich in life, alive himself and giving life to all. God’s revelation does not stop with Moses but continues in the experience of humans. God raises the dead to life as easily as God gives life in the first place. And this resurrection life is radically different from the present one. Not only lack of faith in God but an impoverished imagination insists on portraying such a hope in terms of earthly preoccupations about descent and property!” 

As all these debates in the temple conclude, Jesus points to a poor widow putting two coins in the offering. She is the real symbol of the Kingdom: “a widow left all alone in human terms, is not only herself alive but capable of giving life by sharing “all her living” with others.

Gratefully,

Fr. Dan ofm, Pastor