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Morning Devotion for the Season of Epiphany

January 22, 2024

Feast of Marcella of Rome, 410 CE

Invitatory

The Lord has shown forth his glory; Come let us adore him. 

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.

Reading: Mark 12:41-44

[Jesus] sat down opposite the treasury and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

“We possess nothing in the world—a mere chance can strip us of everything—except the power to say ‘I.’ That is what we have to give to God.

         Simone Weil: Gravity and Grace

Meditation

Here’s my guess: that after reading little more than the first sentence of the text from Mark your thoughts automatically turned to a sense of obligation. It’s a religious contagion. We’re supposed to give. And we’re supposed to give to the church even more than generously. “Sacrificially” comes to mind. After all, the least among those who Jesus observed, “a poor widow,” had faith enough to give “everything she had.” The implication usually drawn from this passage, then, is that our responsibility is no less than hers. Countless appeals for stewardship have put this text to use, drawing us into comparison to the widow. Are you as committed or as heroic as she? And if you’re giving less than all that you have, the answer is “No.” “Everything” is an unforgivingly high bar.

I think, however, that Simone Weil’s comment is an illustrative complement to Mark’s text. Her focus wasn’t on copper coins or large sums of money or any other kind of wealth that can be counted and collected. As she so efficiently pointed out, these can be quickly lost. The only thing that we reliably possess, and all that we can truly give, is ourselves—which dramatically shifts the tone of one’s offering from obligation to something much more like devotion. For there’s no way to quantify giving one’s self. It’s an entirely different act than making a measurable contribution of something else—it’s one that doesn’t allow any objective distance. Nothing more intimate can be done. It’s a mark of desire, not responsibility. 

When Jesus made his observation, he wasn’t trying to tell us what we owe God—or the church. He was, rather, telling us something strictly about himself. For he had chosen the poverty of becoming human; and as someone with us, he never made any claims to anything that might be associated with greatness. Instead, the trajectory of his life was his becoming evermore subject to our judgment and our diminishment of him. He, like the poor widow, was giving himself without reserve, “all that he had to live on.” Such was his devotion—both to God and to us. It was the desire in him that never wavered.

The poor widow may have been able to give up her last remaining possessions because, more than all else, she trusted in God’s devotion to her. How beautiful that Jesus—God’s devotion incarnate—observed her, admiringly. Where is the obligation in this? It can’t be found.

So why do we interject obligation in our own response to God? Isn’t devotion better?

Prayer

You come to us, O Christ: you are the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. All times and seasons are yours, and in you all things hold together and are brought to completion. Draw us by your Spirit into communion with you and one another and make us and all things whole and free in the full force of your deathless love.