THE DAILY GOSPEL

Monday - November 26, 2012 34th Week in Ordinary Time 1st Reading: Rev 14:1-3, 4b-5

I was given another vision: The Lamb was standing on Mount Zion, surrounded by one hundred and forty-four thousand people who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads. A sound reverberated in heaven like the sound of the roaring of waves or deafening thunder; it was like a chorus of singers, accompanied by their harps.

They sing a new song before the throne, in the presence of the four living creatures and the elders, a song which no one can learn except the hundred and forty-four thousand who have been taken from the earth. They are those who were not defiled with women but were chaste; these are given to follow the Lamb wherever he goes. They are the first taken from humankind who are already of God and the Lamb. No deceit has been found in them; they are faultless.

Gospel: Luke 21:1-4

Jesus looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasure box; he also saw a poor widow dropping in two small coins. And he said, “Truly, I tell you, this poor widow put in more than all of them. For all gave an offering from their plenty, but she, out of her poverty, gave all she had to live on.”

Reflection

Widows were the very symbol of the helpless poor. Then when Jesus sees the poor widow putting money, “all she has to live on,” into the Temple treasury, he denounces the practice of taking money from the poor to shore up a decaying religious institution. Her very generosity is a judgment on that institution: it shows how effortlessly successful it has been in exploiting the poor. We too have been very successful, even to the point of putting a pious interpretation on this text. What would Jesus say to us?