Reflection
Recently I was asked to help a 99 year-old woman apply for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which in former days was simply known as food stamps. I put the numbers into the website to see if she might qualify. She qualified. I proceeded to apply. The website was so difficult to navigate that my three attempts were finally blocked when the site froze.
This experience made me keenly aware of what people living in poverty experience every day. The world overwhelms them and many shut down just like the SNAP website.
So when we see people waiting in food queues, whether at soup kitchens or food pantries, we should feel not just compassion.
As disciples, we should also feel anger at a society that promotes individualistic social upward mobility while remaining blind to its consequences for the disadvantaged, especially those living out of sight on the edges of our communities.
In a nation of great wealth, it is outrageous that anyone go hungry, go without healthcare, or live on the streets. We are challenged by today’s readings to be “refusers, renegades, and resisters” (Fr. Daniel Berrigan’s words) in the dominant narrative of upward mobility with its emphasis on riches, honors, pride, and power.
The culture that supports these values would want us to read today’s Gospel as a sweet story of a poor widow surrendering all to God with an encouraging word for the well-to-do to give a little more. But the story is much more radical. Jesus is condemning the Temple economy that permits the scribes and their ilk to enrich themselves at the expense of the widows.
Scholars tell us scribes were the POAs of their day. Someone who has the Power of Attorney is responsible for all the legal transactions of their loved one/client. The scribes managed the affairs of widows, those left helpless in a male dominated culture when their husbands died. Jesus knew the scribes exploited their positions, leaving widows destitute. And he called them out for their external pieties that covered up their greed. They were unfit for discipleship.
As followers of Jesus today, we are called to look behind the veils of external pieties, comforting devotions, accepted training of our youth to never question the dominant, oppressive aspects of our culture.
This Post-Pentecost season is our time to let the Holy Spirit capture us, transform us, open our eyes and make our voices strong to speak, as Jesus modeled for us, against the masqueraded systemic evils all around us.
Jesus is calling us to expose systems of economics and government that hurt our brothers and sisters. It means living more simply and shedding a pastel, passive Christianity for a brilliant life of freedom from the enslavements of status, power, and wealth.
In doing so we can be fortified by the words of Paul to young Timothy:
. . . proclaim the word; be persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient; convince, reprimand, encourage through patience and teaching. For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine but, following their own desires and insatiable curiosity, will accumulate teachers and will stop listening to the truth and will be diverted to myths. But you, be self-possessed in all circumstances; put up with hardship; perform the work of an evangelist; fulfill your ministry.
-2 Timothy 4,2
We pray today for the grace to do as Paul instructs.
