TEXT: Luke21:1-4

SUBJECT: Luke #81: The Widow’s Two Mites

Today’s story is one of the Bible’s most touching.

Its main character is a widow, an old woman without anyone in the world to help her. All she’s got left from her late husband is two pennies. Yet her faith in God is so strong and her love for His poor is so true, that she puts all she has in the offering box, believing the Lord will accept it and do something good with it. There’s no struggle in the woman, apparently; she’s not torn between giving the coins and keeping them. No, she’s what God loves best: a cheerful giver. Her story touches the heart.

But not only the heart: it also touches a nerve—a raw nerve—and makes you wince in pain. The poorest person here has far more than she had, yet how tightly he holds on to it! John Wilkes Booth was the first man to assassinate President Lincoln, but not the last. How many of us have squeezed him to death when it came time to offer a gift to the Lord? Lincoln is on the penny and the five dollar bill—and how we’ve strangled the poor man when he might have done so much good had we let him go!

The widow’s example ought to be followed! Not that we all have to cash in everything we have and give to the church or to missions or to the poor, but that all we have must be at God’s disposal. Our money is only ours in trust: it belongs to the Lord and ought to be saved or invested or spent in a way pleasing to Him.

This is not legalism! For we have no hard and fast rules that apply to everyone, all the time, and regardless of circumstances. I would put no one in bondage in God’s Name. But I would urge every disciple of Christ to make your financial decisions with His glory in mind. No one is perfect, but if you do that, you can’t go wrong.

This, I believe, can be justly inferred from the story. But, the story is not chiefly about the widow and her two mites.

The story is easy to tell—but who can describe it’s wisdom and goodness, and beauty? The Lord and His disciples are near the Temple in Jerusalem. It seems they’re above it on the Mount of Olives, looking down into the patio.

As they sat there, chatting or eating or resting, they notice a number of rich men coming to the offering box down below and dropping in tons of money. If the rich men were the hypocrites I think they were, they made their contributions in the showiest way possible! Maybe the money is carried in ivory chests by servants in scarlet uniforms! Or maybe a trumpet is blown in honor of the gift! Or, maybe the rich men are more dignified than this and find some quieter—but equally noticeable—way to put their money in the box. In any event, the rich are lined up trying to outdo each other in public generosity.

But the Lord takes notice of someone else. She’s an old woman, dressed in black, with a small coin purse in her hand. She reaches into the purse and pulls out her last two coins: they’re mites, the smallest coin in circulation: we’d call them pennies. The Lord realizes that the two coins are all she’s got in the world. And she puts them into the God’s service!

While the disciples are ooohing and aaahing over what the rich are putting into the treasury, the Lord says,

Note the word, "all": She’s not only put in more than anyone else that day—but more than all of them put together! The rich dropped in their thousands, their tens of thousands, maybe their hundreds of thousands, but the offering the Lord praises is the widow’s two mites!

The disciples were taken aback: How can two pennies be more than half a million dollars? The coins won’t do anything worth doing: they won’t maintain the Temple, they won’t pay the salaries of the clergy, they won’t feed the hungry, or send missionaries to places that need a synagogue.

Now the thousands? They’ll do all of the above. A family of priests might live for years on one such gift. Another would clothe a thousand poor people. A third would decorate the building in a way worthy of the God who lives in it.

There’s nothing wrong with big gifts: the Lord is not condemning the rich for their donations. What He’s doing is praising the widow for her gift, which relatively speaking, is far greater than theirs.

Why are her two mites more than the rich man’s million shekels? Because of what it means to them or how it affects it. The man came with a lot and went home to more. The woman came with a little and went home to nothing! In effect, he gave up nothing—how many limousines can you drive? She gave up everything--—for the two mites could have bought her one last meal!

But she will trust herself to the mercy of God who never once forsook the righteous or left their seed to beg bread.

The story is a powerful condemnation of the scribes and their phony devotion to God. Remember in the paragraph just before this one—20:45ff.—the Lord had exposed the scribes for their hypocrisy. They were men who demanded the respect and admiration of God’s People—after all, they taught the Bible and prayed long prayers—but while they were doing these things in public, privately they were cheating widows out of their meager livings!

What kind of widows? The kind who love God so much they give Him their last two mites! That’s what the widows would have been doing with the money the scribes robbed them of in the Sacred Name of God!

Is there a place in hell hot enough for the scribes? For men who beat their chests at church while abusing wife or kids who don’t have the guts or the strength to stand up to them! The Lord save us from ourselves! He wants mercy more than sacrifice; He’d rather you be a tender husband and a generous father than a super-Christian!

Today’s story throws a naked light on the scribes: and it’s not a pretty picture.

A second lesson the story teaches us is the danger of passing judgment without knowing all the facts.

You can imagine what happened the next Sabbath. The Rabbi got up and sang the praises of the rich who gave so much and whose offerings the Lord so loves and will so use to cover the earth with His glory. The widow gets no mention, however, or maybe she does, but it’s none too flattering. Maybe she’s held up as a second class Jew—A Carnal Jew—who has God as her Savior but not as her Lord! Or, maybe she gets a little credit as a nice old lady who does her little bit for God—but she’s not very important and her death will have no real effect on her synagogue.

But that picture is not only incomplete, it’s totally wrong! The rich men ought to be squirming in shame and the widow basking in the glory of what God has done in her! She’s the saint in that church—she’s the one member they can’t do without!

Though no one ever noticed her. Except Christ.

This means we’d do well to suspend our judgment on other people. Maybe the Super-Saints we all admire aren’t so super and maybe the ordinary saints are Extraordinary.

It’s true that you can judge a tree by its fruit, but you seen all the fruit. Maybe the man who has a hard time getting to church every Sunday is an angel at home; and perhaps, at home, the man who never misses a service is an angel that kept not his first estate!

Can we pass any judgment on others? Sure we can. But our judgment is not infallible and it is not final. What it ought to be is full of charity and an eagerness to magnify the good and minimize the bad. After all, we’re to "Do unto others as we would have them do unto us".

The learned scribes are condemned, the rich patrons are ignored, and the little old lady—the one no one ever notices—comes out as God’s favorite saint! Who’d a thunk it?

The story teaches us to judge very little and with a lot of charity!

These are important lessons, but the story is not about the widow or the rich men, but about the Lord Jesus Christ. It tells us two things about Him—

Who He is. The Temple Court was a public place and many people saw the rich donors coming and going. But only One Man noticed the widow—only He had an eye for what matters most. The Man is our Lord Jesus Christ who reveals a sharp insight into human character and the priorities of heaven. Everyone was there and some of them were highly intelligent men, but only He had the understanding to see things as they really are.

This means He is the Sage pointed to in the Old Testament Scriptures and looked forward to by every believing Jew. When we think of the Offices of Christ, we think of Prophet, Priest, and King—and He is all of the above. But there’s another Office in Israel—the office of a Sage, of a wise person. Some of the sages were women—ladies with an eye for what matters. One lived in Tekoah and another in Abel. Most were men who served the kings in Jerusalem. They were often called councillors, men like Ahithophel and Hushai .

Ruling God’s People requires more than power or even knowledge. It requires wisdom—knowledge put to good use. And in Jesus Christ, we have God’s Wisdom in full. In Him are hidden all the treasures of knowledge and wisdom.

This is who the Lord Jesus Christ is—the Wisdom of God. A Wisdom that will never be refuted, a Wisdom you can trust and ought to obey.

If the story tells us Who He is, it also tells us Who He is--to us. He is the One who pays attention. The hidden sorrows we carry around with us, He feels too. The quiet things we do for Him, He marks down. The good intentions—though made a mess of in the doing—He approves of. When others criticize us for doing too little or doing some good thing wrong, we can smile and relax: Jesus Christ knows what we do and—in the end—the only opinion that matters is His opinion.

On earth, no one noticed what the widow did or thanked her for doing it. But in heaven she has been noticed and given a place of honor the rich men can only wish they had. She couldn’t do much, but she did what she could. And that’s enough for Jesus Christ.

Do what you can for Christ and be satisfied. God bless you, everyone. Amen.