NOTES for Mar 12:35-44
The greatest and final stumbling block for the Pharisees was the simplicity of Jesus' origin. How could they acknowledge Him as the Christ, that is, the Messiah? Everyone knows that the Messiah is a descendant of David and therefore of royal lineage. But the Pharisees saw before them only the son of a carpenter. Jesus pushes the question of the Messiah's human origin into the background: the main thing is not so much His belonging to the royal house as the fact that He abides at the right hand of the Father and is the Son of God, the Lord of the world. The following words are a warning against hypocritical piety, when the outward does not correspond to the inward. At the same time Christ does not condemn the outward as such (compare Matt. 23:2-3). The main danger is when the outward becomes merely show. After what Christ said about the scribes, we can appreciate the significance of the widow's mite. Was she not one of those widows whom the scribes, devoted to hypocritically long prayer, were exploiting? On the other hand, Christ had just, in answer to the scribe's question, expressed the essence of the law in the twofold commandment of love. The scribe who questioned Him agreed with Him and, to confirm his agreement, also quoted the law. And yet love for God, inseparable from love for neighbor, was shown not by the scribe but by the poor widow: if we take into account that the subsistence minimum at that time was equal to one denarius, and a quadrans was 1/64 of a denarius, it turns out that the widow had almost nothing for her own sustenance, and this nothing, her last tiny bit, she gave to the temple, offering it as a sacrifice to God. In this episode the full significance of small deeds is revealed to us, deeds measured not by outward calculations but by the degree of self-giving to God in faith and love for Him.