Small Things
The scene is one that I have talked about often in recent years in the history courses that I teach. I use it because it is a wonderful example of how our understanding of the meaning of historical or current events can be different from God’s perspective. Jesus is in the temple, watching events unfold. One by one, wealthy individuals parade through the temple, donating the sums that will keep the temple’s treasury full. If records were kept of donations, these would be the ones that people would tend to notice. But in the middle of it all, Jesus points his disciples somewhere else – a woman, a widow with two copper coins, dropping them without fanfare into the money box. Without Jesus’s input, no one would have noticed the real story of this day. That story, Jesus tells His disciples, is not the big names, not the “important” people, it is the story of this woman, putting in everything that she has (Mark 12:21-44; Luke 21:1-4). The shocking truth this reveals is that the things that m...