First reading from the First Book of Kings 1 Kgs 17:10-16
In those days, Elijah the prophet went to Zarephath. As he arrived at the entrance of the city, a widow was gathering sticks there; he called out to her, "Please bring me a small cupful of water to drink." She left to get it, and he called out after her, "Please bring along a bit of bread." She answered, "As the LORD, your God, lives, I have nothing baked; there is only a handful of flour in my jar and a little oil in my jug. Just now I was collecting a couple of sticks, to go in and prepare something for myself and my son; when we have eaten it, we shall die." Elijah said to her, "Do not be afraid. Go and do as you propose. But first make me a little cake and bring it to me. Then you can prepare something for yourself and your son. For the LORD, the God of Israel, says, 'The jar of flour shall not go empty, nor the jug of oil run dry, until the day when the LORD sends rain upon the earth.'" She left and did as Elijah had said. She was able to eat for a year, and he and her son as well; the jar of flour did not go empty, nor the jug of oil run dry, as the LORD had foretold through Elijah.
PSALM 16
"My birthright, my cup is Yahweh; you, you alone, hold my lot secure. The measuring-line marks out for me a delightful place, my birthright is all I could wish. I bless Yahweh who is my counsellor, even at night my heart instructs me. I keep Yahweh before me always, for with him at my right hand, nothing can shake me. So my heart rejoices, my soul delights, my body too will rest secure, for you will not abandon me to Sheol, you cannot allow your faithful servant to see the abyss. You will teach me the path of life, unbounded joy in your presence, at your right hand delight for ever."
Second reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Hebrews Heb 9:24-28
Christ did not enter into a sanctuary made by hands, a copy of the true one, but heaven itself, that he might now appear before God on our behalf. Not that he might offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters each year into the sanctuary with blood that is not his own; if that were so, he would have had to suffer repeatedly from the foundation of the world. But now once for all he has appeared at the end of the ages to take away sin by his sacrifice. Just as it is appointed that human beings die once, and after this the judgment, so also Christ, offered once to take away the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to take away sin but to bring salvation to those who eagerly await him.
GOSPEL OF THE DAY From the Gospel according to Mark Mk 12:38-44
In the course of his teaching Jesus said to the crowds, "Beware of the scribes, who like to go around in long robes and accept greetings in the marketplaces, seats of honor in synagogues, and places of honor at banquets. They devour the houses of widows and, as a pretext recite lengthy prayers. They will receive a very severe condemnation."
He sat down opposite the treasury and observed how the crowd put money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow also came and put in two small coins worth a few cents. Calling his disciples to himself, he said to them, "Amen, I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the other contributors to the treasury. For they have all contributed from their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood."
WORDS OF THE HOLY FATHER The wealthy contributed with great ostentation what for them was superfluous, while the widow, Jesus says, “put in everything she had, her whole living” (v. 44). For this reason, Jesus says, she gave the most of all. Because of her extreme poverty, she could have offered a single coin to the temple and kept the other for herself. But she did not want to give just half to God; she divested herself of everything. In her poverty she understood that in having God, she had everything; she felt completely loved by him and in turn loved him completely. What a beautiful example this little old woman offers us! (Angelus, 8 November 2015)
FAUSTI - "Out of her misery she threw everything she had, all that was necessary for her life," Jesus says of the widow. By now He is about to leave, but He leaves us a legacy of a discreet teacher, who continues His lesson in silence. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. The passage is a counterpoint: we must beware from the scribes, the false teachers that we love so much, and look at the widow, the true teacher that we prefer to ignore. The first ones have the cult of their own image: they love themselves with all their heart, and they use everything and everyone, even the Lord and His Word to excel. They are the successful prototype of the fundamental sin that is in the heart of every man: protagonism, which puts the ego in the place of God. The poor widow, on the other hand, alone and unnoticed, poor and humble, "throws" her whole life away: she is like Jesus, who made Himself the last of all, and put His Life at the service of all. She has His same Spirit, she is the living Gospel, in which we can always see the Face of our Master. From her the good fragrance of Christ spreads, for the life of the world (2 Cor 2:14). Jesus' first prodigious action was the healing of Peter's mother-in-law so that she could serve (1:29-31). His last instruction before the eschatological discourse, almost His Testament, is to point us to that widow. Without her knowing it, Jesus puts her in His place, so that He can prolong His presence in time. She gives everything for the temple, which will soon be destroyed. In reality, the Temple is Jesus Himself, who interprets her gesture as a concrete answer to His last question. He is the Lord; faith is to recognize Him as such, loving Him with all one's life, because He first loved me with all His Life. But this answer can mature only on the tree of the Cross. This widow is like its anticipated fruit. The barren and dry fig tree begins to give its first fruits.
Jesus shows us the way to recognize Him as Lord and to respond to His previous question: just as this widow threw everything she had into the treasure of the temple, we throw our lives into it and entrust them to Him. The disciple is represented by this woman, who acts like her Lord, doing for Him what He has done for her. She is the perfect fulfillment of the Gospel.
Today our attention is drawn, first of all, to the passage from the Letter to the Hebrews. The Church proposes this New Testament text to us in order to make us meditate on the sublime SACERDOTAL mission of the Word Incarnate. Jesus is the only true and supreme SACERDOT, placed as mediator between God and men. The other SACERDOTES, who came before Him, were a figure of what He would have been. Those who came after Him are ministers of His own SACERDOTIUM, of which they make present again the great and unique SACRIFICE, together with the merits produced by it. And it is precisely of this SACRIFICE that the second reading speaks today, when it says that the SACRIFICE of Jesus was offered once and for all, in the fullness of time, to annul SIN. In that SACRIFICE Jesus is SACERDOTE and victim; He immolated Himself to atone not for His own SINS, which He had never committed, but for ours. Moreover, Jesus did not offer His SACRIFICE in a man-made sanctuary, such as the temple in Jerusalem, but in heaven itself, in the presence of God, to Whom alone Jesus was worthy to present Himself to intercede on our behalf. The singular dignity of the PRIESTHOOD of Jesus has important reflections in the life of the Church. First of all, they shed light on the greatness of the ministerial SACERDOTIUM, which the Church confers on priests and bishops, who prolong and apply in time the saving power of the SACERDOTIUM of Jesus, acting "in persona Christi", that is, as living instruments of the very Person of the Redeemer. Hence the respect and veneration which we must all have for God's ministers; hence also the incentive for young people to respond to the call to sacred ministry which Jesus addresses to many of them. But the PRIESTHOOD of Christ also concerns all the baptized faithful, men and women without distinction. To a certain extent they too are sharers in it, because, united to Him through grace, they derive legitimacy from Him and represent Him whenever they proclaim His Word for them. and raise prayers to God and serve their brothers and sisters with charity. This common PRIESTHOOD of all the faithful must be lived with awareness and responsibility, especially in the commitment to that new evangelization which is required in our time by the proclamation of the Word and the witness of charity. 4. Today, in the Gospel, Jesus denounces the presumptuous and hypocritical behavior of some of the scribes of his time; He exhorts His listeners never to act in order to gain praise and esteem from men or to obtain privileges from important people. . He also exhorts them to avoid that, under the hypocritical ostentation of a religious life, indifference to the POOR, the marginalized, the defenseless and those rejected by society be hidden. The Word of Jesus again reveals that the goodness of works depends not only on the actions themselves, but also and from all on the intention and purity of the heart. In the Temple in Jerusalem, before Jesus and the disciples, the crowd threw coins into the treasury. And many rich people were throwing many coins. A POOR WIDOW came and threw in two coins, a minimal offering. But Jesus commented, "This WOMAN threw more into the treasury than all the others, for they all gave of their surplus, but this one, in her poverty, put in everything she had, everything she had to live on" (Mk 12:43-44). Jesus thus confirms what He has said on many other occasions: that God alone knows what is hidden in the heart of man, that God alone is the judge of human actions, that righteousness and generosity of life have their roots in the heart, in the depths of the conscience, and that what counts before God is sincerity and truth, not vain appearances .... Do not cease to trust in God, who is rich in mercy and goodness, in him who - as the Responsorial Psalm says - "restores sight to the blind, / raises up the fallen, / loves the just, / protects the stranger". Amen
Today’s Gospel episode (cf. Mk 12:38-44) concludes the series of Jesus’ teachings given in the Temple of Jerusalem and highlights two contrasting figures: the scribe and the widow. But why are they counterposed? The scribe represents important, wealthy, influential people; the other person — the widow — represents the least, the poor, the weak. In reality, Jesus’ resolute judgment of the scribes is not about the whole profession, but refers to those of them who flaunt their own social position, embellish themselves with the title of ‘rabbi’, that is, teacher, who love to be revered and take the best seats (cf. vv. 38-39).
What is worse is that their ostentation is, above all, of a religious nature, because they pray — Jesus says — and “for a pretense make long prayers” (v. 40), and use God in order to gain respect for themselves as the defenders of his law. This attitude of superiority and vanity causes them to have contempt for those who count for little or who find themselves in an unfavourable economic position, such as widows.
Jesus exposes this perverse mechanism: he denounces the oppression of the weak carried out misleadingly on the basis of religious motivations, declaring clearly that God is on the side of the least. And to really impress this lesson on the minds of the disciples he offers them a living example: a poor widow, whose social position was irrelevant because she had no husband who could defend her rights, and therefore she became easy prey to unscrupulous creditors, because these creditors hounded the weak so they would pay them. This woman, who goes to the temple treasury to put in just two coins — all that she had left — and makes her offering by seeking to pass by unobserved, almost as if ashamed. But, in this very humility, she performs an act laden with great religious and spiritual significance. That gesture full of sacrifice does not escape the gaze of Jesus, who instead sees shining in it the total self-giving to which he wishes to educate his disciples.
The lesson that Jesus offers us today helps us to recover what is essential in our life and fosters a practical and daily relationship with God. Brothers and sisters, the Lord’s scales are different from ours. He weighs people and their actions differently: God does not measure quantity but quality; he examines the heart; he looks at the purity of intentions. This means that our “giving” to God in prayer and to others in charity should always steer clear of ritualism and formalism, as well as of the logic of calculation, and must be an expression of gratuity, as Jesus did with us: he saved us freely. And we must do things as an expression of gratuity. This is why Jesus points to that poor and generous widow as a model of Christian life to be imitated. We do not know her name; however, we know her heart — we will find her in Heaven and go to greet her, certainly; and that is what counts before God. When we are tempted by the desire to stand out and give an accounting of our altruistic gestures, when we are too interested in the gaze of others and — might I say — when we act like ‘peacocks’, let us think of this woman. It will do us good: it will help us to divest ourselves of the superfluous in order to go to what truly counts, and to remain humble.
May the Virgin Mary, a poor woman who gave herself totally to God, sustain us in the aim of giving to the Lord and to brothers and sisters not something of ours but ourselves, in a humble and generous offering.
First reading from the First Book of Kings
RispondiElimina1 Kgs 17:10-16
In those days, Elijah the prophet went to Zarephath.
As he arrived at the entrance of the city,
a widow was gathering sticks there; he called out to her,
"Please bring me a small cupful of water to drink."
She left to get it, and he called out after her,
"Please bring along a bit of bread."
She answered, "As the LORD, your God, lives,
I have nothing baked; there is only a handful of flour in my jar
and a little oil in my jug.
Just now I was collecting a couple of sticks,
to go in and prepare something for myself and my son;
when we have eaten it, we shall die."
Elijah said to her, "Do not be afraid.
Go and do as you propose.
But first make me a little cake and bring it to me.
Then you can prepare something for yourself and your son.
For the LORD, the God of Israel, says,
'The jar of flour shall not go empty,
nor the jug of oil run dry,
until the day when the LORD sends rain upon the earth.'"
She left and did as Elijah had said.
She was able to eat for a year, and he and her son as well;
the jar of flour did not go empty,
nor the jug of oil run dry,
as the LORD had foretold through Elijah.
PSALM 16
"My birthright, my cup is Yahweh;
you, you alone, hold my lot secure.
The measuring-line marks out for me a delightful place,
my birthright is all I could wish.
I bless Yahweh who is my counsellor,
even at night my heart instructs me.
I keep Yahweh before me always,
for with him at my right hand, nothing can shake me.
So my heart rejoices, my soul delights,
my body too will rest secure,
for you will not abandon me to Sheol,
you cannot allow your faithful servant
to see the abyss.
You will teach me the path of life,
unbounded joy in your presence,
at your right hand delight for ever."
Second reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Hebrews
Heb 9:24-28
Christ did not enter into a sanctuary made by hands,
a copy of the true one, but heaven itself,
that he might now appear before God on our behalf.
Not that he might offer himself repeatedly,
as the high priest enters each year into the sanctuary
with blood that is not his own;
if that were so, he would have had to suffer repeatedly
from the foundation of the world.
But now once for all he has appeared at the end of the ages
to take away sin by his sacrifice.
Just as it is appointed that human beings die once,
and after this the judgment, so also Christ,
offered once to take away the sins of many,
will appear a second time, not to take away sin
but to bring salvation to those who eagerly await him.
GOSPEL OF THE DAY
RispondiEliminaFrom the Gospel according to Mark
Mk 12:38-44
In the course of his teaching Jesus said to the crowds,
"Beware of the scribes, who like to go around in long robes
and accept greetings in the marketplaces,
seats of honor in synagogues,
and places of honor at banquets.
They devour the houses of widows and, as a pretext
recite lengthy prayers.
They will receive a very severe condemnation."
He sat down opposite the treasury
and observed how the crowd put money into the treasury.
Many rich people put in large sums.
A poor widow also came and put in two small coins worth a few cents.
Calling his disciples to himself, he said to them,
"Amen, I say to you, this poor widow put in more
than all the other contributors to the treasury.
For they have all contributed from their surplus wealth,
but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had,
her whole livelihood."
WORDS OF THE HOLY FATHER
The wealthy contributed with great ostentation what for them was superfluous, while the widow, Jesus says, “put in everything she had, her whole living” (v. 44). For this reason, Jesus says, she gave the most of all. Because of her extreme poverty, she could have offered a single coin to the temple and kept the other for herself. But she did not want to give just half to God; she divested herself of everything. In her poverty she understood that in having God, she had everything; she felt completely loved by him and in turn loved him completely. What a beautiful example this little old woman offers us! (Angelus, 8 November 2015)
FAUSTI - "Out of her misery she threw everything she had, all that was necessary for her life," Jesus says of the widow.
RispondiEliminaBy now He is about to leave, but He leaves us a legacy of a discreet teacher, who continues His lesson in silence. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
The passage is a counterpoint: we must beware from the scribes, the false teachers that we love so much, and look at the widow, the true teacher that we prefer to ignore.
The first ones have the cult of their own image: they love themselves with all their heart, and they use everything and everyone, even the Lord and His Word to excel.
They are the successful prototype of the fundamental sin that is in the heart of every man: protagonism, which puts the ego in the place of God.
The poor widow, on the other hand, alone and unnoticed, poor and humble, "throws" her whole life away: she is like Jesus, who made Himself the last of all, and put His Life at the service of all.
She has His same Spirit, she is the living Gospel, in which we can always see the Face of our Master. From her the good fragrance of Christ spreads, for the life of the world (2 Cor 2:14).
Jesus' first prodigious action was the healing of Peter's mother-in-law so that she could serve (1:29-31). His last instruction before the eschatological discourse, almost His Testament, is to point us to that widow.
Without her knowing it, Jesus puts her in His place, so that He can prolong His presence in time.
She gives everything for the temple, which will soon be destroyed. In reality, the Temple is Jesus Himself, who interprets her gesture as a concrete answer to His last question. He is the Lord; faith is to recognize Him as such, loving Him with all one's life, because He first loved me with all His Life.
But this answer can mature only on the tree of the Cross.
This widow is like its anticipated fruit. The barren and dry fig tree begins to give its first fruits.
Jesus shows us the way to recognize Him as Lord and to respond to His previous question: just as this widow threw everything she had into the treasure of the temple, we throw our lives into it and entrust them to Him.
The disciple is represented by this woman, who acts like her Lord, doing for Him what He has done for her. She is the perfect fulfillment of the Gospel.
JOHN PAUL II - Sunday, 10 November 1991
RispondiEliminaToday our attention is drawn, first of all, to the passage from the Letter to the Hebrews. The Church proposes this New Testament text to us in order to make us meditate on the sublime SACERDOTAL mission of the Word Incarnate. Jesus is the only true and supreme SACERDOT, placed as mediator between God and men. The other SACERDOTES, who came before Him, were a figure of what He would have been. Those who came after Him are ministers of His own SACERDOTIUM, of which they make present again the great and unique SACRIFICE, together with the merits produced by it.
And it is precisely of this SACRIFICE that the second reading speaks today, when it says that the SACRIFICE of Jesus was offered once and for all, in the fullness of time, to annul SIN. In that SACRIFICE Jesus is SACERDOTE and victim; He immolated Himself to atone not for His own SINS, which He had never committed, but for ours. Moreover, Jesus did not offer His SACRIFICE in a man-made sanctuary, such as the temple in Jerusalem, but in heaven itself, in the presence of God, to Whom alone Jesus was worthy to present Himself to intercede on our behalf.
The singular dignity of the PRIESTHOOD of Jesus has important reflections in the life of the Church. First of all, they shed light on the greatness of the ministerial SACERDOTIUM, which the Church confers on priests and bishops, who prolong and apply in time the saving power of the SACERDOTIUM of Jesus, acting "in persona Christi", that is, as living instruments of the very Person of the Redeemer. Hence the respect and veneration which we must all have for God's ministers; hence also the incentive for young people to respond to the call to sacred ministry which Jesus addresses to many of them.
But the PRIESTHOOD of Christ also concerns all the baptized faithful, men and women without distinction. To a certain extent they too are sharers in it, because, united to Him through grace, they derive legitimacy from Him and represent Him whenever they proclaim His Word for them.
and raise prayers to God and serve their brothers and sisters with charity.
This common PRIESTHOOD of all the faithful must be lived with awareness and responsibility, especially in the commitment to that new evangelization which is required in our time by the proclamation of the Word and the witness of charity.
4. Today, in the Gospel, Jesus denounces the presumptuous and hypocritical behavior of some of the scribes of his time; He exhorts His listeners never to act in order to gain praise and esteem from men or to obtain privileges from important people. . He also exhorts them to avoid that, under the hypocritical ostentation of a religious life, indifference to the POOR, the marginalized, the defenseless and those rejected by society be hidden.
The Word of Jesus again reveals that the goodness of works depends not only on the actions themselves, but also and from all on the intention and purity of the heart.
In the Temple in Jerusalem, before Jesus and the disciples, the crowd threw coins into the treasury. And many rich people were throwing many coins.
A POOR WIDOW came and threw in two coins, a minimal offering. But Jesus commented, "This WOMAN threw more into the treasury than all the others, for they all gave of their surplus, but this one, in her poverty, put in everything she had, everything she had to live on" (Mk 12:43-44).
Jesus thus confirms what He has said on many other occasions: that God alone knows what is hidden in the heart of man, that God alone is the judge of human actions, that righteousness and generosity of life have their roots in the heart, in the depths of the conscience, and that what counts before God is sincerity and truth, not vain appearances .... Do not cease to trust in God, who is rich in mercy and goodness, in him who - as the Responsorial Psalm says - "restores sight to the blind, / raises up the fallen, / loves the just, / protects the stranger". Amen
Today’s Gospel episode (cf. Mk 12:38-44) concludes the series of Jesus’ teachings given in the Temple of Jerusalem and highlights two contrasting figures: the scribe and the widow. But why are they counterposed? The scribe represents important, wealthy, influential people; the other person — the widow — represents the least, the poor, the weak. In reality, Jesus’ resolute judgment of the scribes is not about the whole profession, but refers to those of them who flaunt their own social position, embellish themselves with the title of ‘rabbi’, that is, teacher, who love to be revered and take the best seats (cf. vv. 38-39).
RispondiEliminaWhat is worse is that their ostentation is, above all, of a religious nature, because they pray — Jesus says — and “for a pretense make long prayers” (v. 40), and use God in order to gain respect for themselves as the defenders of his law. This attitude of superiority and vanity causes them to have contempt for those who count for little or who find themselves in an unfavourable economic position, such as widows.
Jesus exposes this perverse mechanism: he denounces the oppression of the weak carried out misleadingly on the basis of religious motivations, declaring clearly that God is on the side of the least. And to really impress this lesson on the minds of the disciples he offers them a living example: a poor widow, whose social position was irrelevant because she had no husband who could defend her rights, and therefore she became easy prey to unscrupulous creditors, because these creditors hounded the weak so they would pay them. This woman, who goes to the temple treasury to put in just two coins — all that she had left — and makes her offering by seeking to pass by unobserved, almost as if ashamed. But, in this very humility, she performs an act laden with great religious and spiritual significance. That gesture full of sacrifice does not escape the gaze of Jesus, who instead sees shining in it the total self-giving to which he wishes to educate his disciples.
The lesson that Jesus offers us today helps us to recover what is essential in our life and fosters a practical and daily relationship with God. Brothers and sisters, the Lord’s scales are different from ours. He weighs people and their actions differently: God does not measure quantity but quality; he examines the heart; he looks at the purity of intentions. This means that our “giving” to God in prayer and to others in charity should always steer clear of ritualism and formalism, as well as of the logic of calculation, and must be an expression of gratuity, as Jesus did with us: he saved us freely. And we must do things as an expression of gratuity. This is why Jesus points to that poor and generous widow as a model of Christian life to be imitated. We do not know her name; however, we know her heart — we will find her in Heaven and go to greet her, certainly; and that is what counts before God. When we are tempted by the desire to stand out and give an accounting of our altruistic gestures, when we are too interested in the gaze of others and — might I say — when we act like ‘peacocks’, let us think of this woman. It will do us good: it will help us to divest ourselves of the superfluous in order to go to what truly counts, and to remain humble.
May the Virgin Mary, a poor woman who gave herself totally to God, sustain us in the aim of giving to the Lord and to brothers and sisters not something of ours but ourselves, in a humble and generous offering.