NOTES for Mar 12:38-44
At first glance it may appear that the episode with the poor widow who donated to the Temple the last thing she had has no direct relation to Jesus' words about the Pharisees, words sharp enough to make anyone stop and think. But on closer examination everything is not so simple. What does a person's readiness to give God the last thing mean? A practical acknowledgment of the fact that God is more important to that person than anything else? Yes, of course, that too. But also something else: readiness to give everything also presupposes complete trust in the One to whom you give everything. Acting this way, a person says to God, as it were: here is everything I have; I give it to You. I do not know what will happen next, and I place myself in Your hands. I trust You and am sure that You will not abandon me. A Pharisee who "devours widows' houses" could hardly address God in this way. And the point is not that this Pharisee was breaking the law. Nor even that, while being right according to the law, he could be wrong from the point of view of the mercy he could have shown but did not show. Something else is frightening here: the passion for acquisition, for that accumulation of property which, if it becomes an end in itself, clearly testifies to practical distrust of God, even if outwardly the person remains very religious, as all the Pharisees were. After all, it is not religion that opens the road into the Kingdom, but the Savior. And only trust in Him and in God can help one walk there, not religiosity in itself.