32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

November 8, 2009

1 Kgs 17,10-16
Heb 9,24-28
Mk 12,38-44

The modern market economy is built on competition – it accepts conflict and tension as normal between consumers and producers, between producers and sellers, between laborers and employers, between creditors and borrowers. Whether it is a transaction of goods or services, each party wants to get the highest benefit as possible from the other.

What Jesus chooses to underline in contrasting the Pharisee and the widow is not their interplay within a market economy but their contrasting cultures and behavior on the religious plane. The behaviors of the rich are consistent with their values in upper class society, taste in fashion, cultural convention, and religious affiliation. Unfortunately their moral behaviors are not consistent with the values of nobility, as captured in the concept of nobles oblige. Instead of responding to the duties of nobility, they act ignobly: Jesus accuses them of devouring the houses of widows and deodorizing their exploitation through religious compensations.

In recent attempts at recreating EDSA, it is curious to find that some of the most strident voices about nation-building are precisely those which in our local contexts we recognize as most defensive about their own welfare; their interest in the nation is only defined by their contribution to their class interests. It no longer surprises to discover that the biggest tax-evaders, smugglers, and rent capitalists are to be found not in criminal syndicates but in the legislature, the judiciary, and the executive departments. It no longer scandalizes that many of them are even the biggest sponsors and highly visible friends of the church.

Jesus warns us against appearances and reminds us that the nation is built up not so much by those big names as by small people – farmers, fishers, wage-earners who pay small amounts of taxes which collectively move the country forward. At the same time, Jesus introduces a message that could easily be missed: the widow was contributing “all she had, her whole livelihood” – a question of justice if viewed from the social context, but also of nobility if viewed from the viewpoint of moral character. A rich man high in status and full of religion but without morals; a destitute widow presumably with neither education nor religion but rich in honor – with which of them would we rather identify? With which of them would Jesus identify our own persons?

Fr. Diony Miranda, SVD
USC, Cebu City
(The Word in Other Words)