One of my favourite Christmas carols is In the bleak mid-winter, and I can’t easily sing the last bit without choking up. If you know it, it is the song of the Christian soul before the Christmas crib, saying, ‘What can I give to You, poor though I am? if I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb; if I were a wise man, I would do my part; but what I can I give to You, I give to You my heart.’
What does the Holy One ask of us, really? We hear Him sometimes in the gospels say things like, He who is not prepared to hate his parents, his children and his friends for My sake is not worthy of Me. Doesn’t that sound awful, coming from the King of kings? But, of course, what He means is that we should be prepared (if we are asked) to lay aside everything, even the people most dear to us, for His sake. On this weekend, when in memorial services, we remember the ultimate sacrifice paid by so many soldiers for the sake of their countrymen and for the peace of their families and communities, it is providential that the readings at Mass have to deal with two poor women, who gave everything they had for the service of God and for love of Him. Literally for that.
“As He was sitting opposite the treasury of the temple, Jesus watched the multitude throwing coins into the treasury, the many rich with their many offerings; and there was one poor widow, who came and put in two mites, which make a farthing. Thereupon He called His disciples to Him, and said to them, ‘Believe Me, this poor widow has put in more than all those others who have put offerings into the treasury. The others all gave out of what they had to spare; she, with so little to give, put in all that she had, her whole livelihood.'”
Gospel of S. Mark, 12: 41-44 [link]
What was the function of the Jerusalem Temple, supported by its treasury, as mentioned in the gospel story? The function was the sacrifice of animals, in reparation for sin and worship of God. The worship of God requires purity and freedom from grave sin. This is true of both Jewish and Christian worship. By putting her last two pennies into the Temple coffers, the woman was giving her life to provide for the daily offerings at the Temple, for the forgiveness of her sins and the sins of her nation, so that divine worship could continue.
In the first reading, we have the story of an Old Testament Saint, the miracle-working Elijah. This man was like John the Baptist, living in the desert, and he evidently had not in this story found his diet of locusts and wild honey, and was desperately hungry. Everybody knew Elijah, that he was a man of God, and carrying out the crucial ministry of prophet in Israel, at a time when it was prohibited for prophets of God to work. The cruel Phoenician queen of the Israelite king Achab – the well-known Jezebel – had put prophets of the Hebrew religion to death about this time. In giving everything she had to provide a meal for the hungry prophet, the woman did something similar to what the woman of the gospel story did, to preserve what remained of the Hebrew religion in Israel. And she receives an extraordinary miracle for her efforts, and probably never again went hungry.
“So he rose up and went to Sarephtha, and he had but reached the city gate when he met a woman gathering fire-wood; whereupon he called out to her, asking her to give him a cup of water to drink. And as she went to fetch it, he cried after her, ‘And when thou dost bring it, bring me, too, a mouthful of bread.’ ‘Why,’ she told him, ‘as surely as the Lord thou servest is a living God, I have no food except a handful of flour at the bottom of a jar, and a drop of oil left in a cruet. Even now I am gathering a stick or two, to serve my son and me for our last meal.’ ‘Have no fear,’ Elias said; ‘go home on this errand of thine; only use the flour to make me a little girdle-cake first, and bring it me here; cook what is left for thyself and thy son. This message the Lord God of Israel has for thee: There shall be no lack of flour in the jar, nor shall the oil waste in the cruet, till the Lord sends rain on this parched earth.’ At that, she went and did Elias’ bidding, and there was a meal for him and for her and for all her household; and from that day onwards there was still flour in the jar, still oil left in the cruet, as the Lord’s message through Elias had promised her.”
III Kings (also called I Kings), 17: 10-16 [link]
What shall we say for the woman of the gospel? Can we doubt that, once she was indicated to the Apostles by Christ as in this story, that she was taken under the wing of the early Church and never again went hungry? These two women remind of the great English women of the reign of Queen Elisabeth I, who at great risk to their lives harboured and cared for the priests of the Church, who travelled the country at a time when it was illegal to be a Catholic priest in England. Three of them we know well, for they payed for it with their lives: S. Margaret Clitheroe, S. Anne Line, S. Margaret Ward. They gave everything to preserve the Old Catholic religion of England, and to preserve the Holy Mass, in the face of the Protestant opposition.
They preserved however briefly the vision of our second reading this weekend, which is the vision of Holy Mass as the Church has always taught it: Christ entering the sanctuary on high, to appear before God the Father to plead on our behalf. There He is still now behind the veil of the heavenly Temple, and the Mass in part is a memorial of when Christ prepared to enter behind that veil in the Passion and Death and Resurrection, and when He did vanish behind it in His Ascension. One day the veil will part once more and He will return with shining face, as Moses did when he came down mount Sinai, forgiveness found, reparation completed, mankind joined once more to God, peace abounding, joy eternal.
“The sanctuary into which Jesus has entered is not one made by human hands, is not some adumbration of the truth; He has entered heaven itself, where He now appears in God’s sight on our behalf. Nor does He make a repeated offering of Himself, as the high priest, when he enters the sanctuary, makes a yearly offering of the blood that is not his own. If that were so, He must have suffered again and again, ever since the world was created; as it is, He has been revealed once for all, at the moment when history reached its fulfilment, annulling our sin by His sacrifice. Man’s destiny is to die once for all; nothing remains after that but judgement; and Christ was offered once for all, to drain the cup of a world’s sins; when we see Him again, sin will play its part no longer, He will be bringing salvation to those who await His coming.”
Letter of S. Paul to the Hebrews, 9: 24-28 [link]
Catholic Louth and Mablethorpe 