On Mark 12:44

Tonight’s reading at church told of a woman from 2 thousand years ago who gave all she had to her Lord’s temple at the time. Jesus, being in the same room where this woman dropped her last two coins-mites, noticed; or we might say, God read the room around and saw her as the only story and heart worth noting. Anyone can give from abundance, and anyone can take power to redistribute with calculated and political costs. This is no new thing. What is new is that God, who embraced a vow of poverty, saw in her another impoverished person in a state of being fully given—a kind of super generosity, if you will. Only two poor people were truly in that room that day, each aligned in the right way before God, and one of them was the very God on whom this act of giving was centered. Truth won’t be spoken to power because power doesn’t care. Instead, truth will be lived out, shared in, and found in a generosity that power can’t claim.