"Widow’s Mite", – Daniel Bonnell
“Do not be afraid.”
For the last several months, the news has been full of stories about the thousands and thousands of people leaving the war torn country of Syria, and fleeing out of fear for their lives to any other country that might take them. They have left everything behind in hopes of finding a safe place to live.
You might call these people examples of collateral damage and this great migration a possibly unintended consequence of this latest war.
No war has ever been fought without collateral damage.
In I Kings, the writer describes a cosmic war between the prophets of the Lord God of Israel and the prophets of the deity Baal, who was worshiped in the Middle East as a god of weather and fertility. Followers of Baal prayed to this deity for rain, and for the growth of their crops.
In one face-off with the prophets of Baal, God, in order to prove that He is the one who has dominion over nature, decrees that a drought will settle into the area and will linger, no matter how hard the prophets of Baal pray for rain.
Elijah, who predicts the drought to begin with, ends up, like everyone else, struggling to survive, and so God sends Elijah to Zaraphath, where he finds a widow at the gate of the town gathering sticks.
We could consider the suffering of this widow collateral damage in this cosmic war, because this drought, brought about by God, is going to bring about this woman’s death. As a widow, she already has few resources to fall back on, and she must share these resources with her son. The drought has taken away all she has, and her fate will be to starve to death.
She has lost all hope in this situation, because she tells Elijah that after she cooks the little bit of meal she has left and she and her son eat that, they will die, because there will be nothing else to eat.
So Elijah says to her, and you all know that this is one of my favorite lines in the Bible, whether angels are saying it, or Jesus is saying it, or a prophet like Elijah is saying it—
“DO NOT BE AFRAID!”
Elijah tells the widow not to be afraid of running out of what she needs, or to be afraid of dying as a result of the drought, but to trust that God will provide meal and oil for her family through the rest of the drought.
And so the widow, with nothing to lose, decides to have some hope, decides to trust God, shares the little she has with Elijah, and God does provide all she needs, just as Elijah has said.
All of us have fears of one sort or another.
What do you fear the most in your life? Take some time to think about that.
Now think about how you are responding to that fear right now.
How would your response change if you offered that fear up to God and trusted God to give you what you needed to deal with that fear and replace it with hope—or if you can’t give up your fear, how would your life change if you chose to fear in the context of hope rather than despair?
Jesus knows our inmost thoughts.
So Jesus knew that the widow he saw at the temple treasury in Jerusalem who gave her two small copper coins as an offering was not acting out of hopelessness, as in “Since all I have left is these two coins, I’ll go put them into the treasury, and die.” Instead, she was giving all that she had with the trust that God would provide all that she needed to live.
Jesus commended this woman’s actions to the disciples.
The widow’s trust is the deep trust in God that Jesus wanted the disciples to have, because soon they would face fear greater than any fear that they had ever known when Jesus was arrested and crucified on a cross–when Jesus died, and was laid in a tomb.
The disciples would then fear for their own lives. Peter would be so full of fear that he would deny even knowing Jesus.
The disciples would be tempted to live in fear, and never breathe a word about the Good News to anyone, rather than to live out of the hope that Jesus was truly the Messiah, and that God’s reign was truly near, as Jesus had been telling them since the beginning of his ministry in Galilee.
And so Jesus commends this woman’s actions to the disciples, and to us.
Because Jesus knows that we are constantly tempted to give in to our fears, to be bound by them, and to be held captive forever.
Jesus challenges us to take our lives, and all that we have, even when, and especially when we fear the most and have the most to lose, and to offer everything, and especially our fears, up to God in trust.
Amen.