Following the widow with verve

Second Sunday before Advent 2025

Malachi 4.1-2a; II Thessalonians 3.6-13; Luke 21.5-19


Jesus makes three predictions in St Luke ch. 21. The first foretells the destruction by the Romans of the Temple and the city of Jerusalem in 70AD. This event was firmly in the past when Luke first wrote his two-part history (his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles) between 80 and 90AD; but it remains one of the great punctuation marks of antiquity, a stark reminder of the brutality of Roman power, and of their willingness to destroy even the beautification of the Temple carried out not quite a century before by their vassal king Herod the Great. (One imagines that the whole exercise might not have been very different from Mr Trump’s beautification of the White House, but we should not speculate.)


The siege and fall of Jerusalem is described as a prelude to the advent of the Son of Man on the Last Day, to judge the living and the dead, those who have waited, and still are waiting patiently in their graves (and whom we will join in the very last of our orderly queues) until God calls time on the whole universe and establishes the ‘new heaven and the new earth’ foretold in Revelation ch. 21. But this may seem too distant and theoretical an idea to enable us to get much purchase on the Last Judgement. It is certainly true that, as we see in the prophet Malachi, we do hope for a day of reckoning for all whose vices and virtues have gone unnoticed; but maybe we are happier to imagine judgement taking place immediately after our own death? Perhaps that would concentrate the mind and improve our behaviour better than awaiting some unimaginable ending of the world? Best of all may be the realisation that every day is Judgement Day: every day our actions are measurable against the example of Christ himself and his command that we should love one another as he loved us.


Jesus’ second prophecy concerns the suffering of his followers. There has never been a time that this has not been the case somewhere in the world. This fact, of course, cannot and does not diminish the sufferings of those of other faiths and none; neither does it excuse the shameful sufferings inflicted on others in the name of Christ and Christianity. ‘Man hands on misery to man,’ as the poet Larkin rightly observes.


Luke’s Acts of the Apostles is a veritable litany of the suffering of the first Christians, with the stoning of St Stephen, the execution of St James, and the probable beheading of St Paul by Emperor Nero in 64AD. Luke’s own readers would have known their own share of suffering at the hands of religious and political authority. In every age, indeed, Christians can look back on their predecessors’ sufferings, which are congruent with the sufferings of Christ himself, and of the prophets who came before him. As Simeon predicts at Candlemas (Luke 2.22-40), Jesus is ‘a sign of contradiction’, and all who follow him must be ready for ‘a sword to pierce their own soul also.’


Jesus later describes the commissioning of his disciples as sending them out into the world ‘like lambs among wolves’. Yet – wonderful to relate – whenever there has been suffering, there has been tremendous growth in number. This prompted the Church’s Early Fathers to observe that ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.’ Luke’s community certainly didn’t suffer any adverse effects of persecution: his community was what one writer has called ‘victoriously and joyfully confident.’


To those of us who belong to a Church of England which seems terminally and tediously riven by questions of sex and gender, and which apparently lurches towards an ever-encroaching managerialism and general bureaucratisation of goodness, we might feel somewhat envious of that experience of ‘joyful confidence’. But no church may covet the history of another. We are all born in our own time and place, and are given our own work to do; so that when we stand before the Judgement of the Son of Man we might – if we have been faithful – look back on a life well spent.


One character in Luke 21 who might hold the key to that faithfulness is found at the beginning of the chapter. A poor widow who puts her last two brass farthings into the Temple treasury, her action sparks off the whole conversation about the beauty of the Temple and its future demise. Like the suffering Church, and like those who approach Judgement with an easy mind, she has given her whole life to God, symbolised here by her financial donation, which leaves her with nothing for her own security, and which throws her entirely upon the mercy of God and the kindness of neighbours.


If we were to copy her in the Christ-like totality of her self-giving, we would perhaps find something of the joy we seek, and the salvation we long for.