This is the edited text for the Homily for Mass on the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, 10 November 2024.
Sir Jamshedji Nusserwanji Tata, the 19th century Persian-Indian industrialist, founded India’s largest business conglomerate, the Tata Group, and established the eponymous city of Jamshedpur. In his lifetime he gave away more than $US100 billion in today’s values, far more than big name benefactors like Carnegie, Dunant, Ford, Getty, Hughes, Nobel or Rockefeller, or, more recent stars such as Buffet, Gates and Winfrey. Tata was the most generous philanthropist in history.
Our word “philanthropy” comes from the Greek, φιλανθρωπία (philanthrōpía), meaning “love of humanity.” So a philanthropist is someone who has dedicated vast resources to worthy causes for the betterment of society. Tata, for example, applied the fortune he had made from textiles, steel and hydroelectricity, to the Tata Endowment, which enabled generations of bright Indian students, including women, to pursue higher studies in Britain; the Indian Institute of Science, a world-class academic and research centre; as well as other educational and medical charities. Other philanthropists have established libraries, museums and colleges, hospitals, art collections, scientific institutions, immunisation programmes, food and medical supplies, churches and more…
Although it’s the size of philanthropic donations that usually gets the headlines, numbers aren’t everything. For one thing, it risks valorising only the generosity of the uber-wealthy, when smaller donors may in fact be more self-sacrificing. What’s more, big-ticket projects often make very little real contribution. Most importantly, philanthropy is only truly what the name suggests if it is about more than dollars or results, about something at the core of who we are. For Christians, at least, it’s about seeing every human being as an image of God, made for happiness and holiness, and so aspiring to ensure the conditions for each one to flourish. As one human family, those of us with more than we need must share with those who have less.
In our first reading (1Kgs 17:10-16), Elijah is on a mission to call the wicked King Ahab and his Jezebel to account. Living for a time off drought-stricken land and relying on birds to feed him (1Kgs 17:6-8), the prophet had had enough of country life and so makes for the town of Sidon (or Saida in modern-day Lebanon). It was famous for glass manufacturing and producing purple dye from shells, but Elijah was more interested in simple food and drink. He approaches a woman at the city gate and asks for some bread and water. It turns out she’s a poor widow, struggling to feed herself and her boy, and in no position to help strangers. She rather melodramatically declares that the scraps she’s preparing will be her last and then she and her son will lie down and die!
Elijah plays on her religious piety and sense of duty towards the needy stranger. “Don’t be afraid to share the little you have,” he counsels, “God will look after you.” Like the boy who centuries later would surrender two fish and five barley loaves to Jesus, she gives the little she has and this enables God’s glory to shine forth and multiply the food. Her trust is rewarded in ways she could never have imagined.
Our lectionary pairs the story of The Widow of Zarephath with that of The Widow’s Mite (Mk 12:38-44). As Jesus sits opposite the Temple Treasury, He’s observing the comings and goings. An unassuming woman donates two λεπτὰ (lepta) or copper halfpennies. By the standards of a Tata or a Warren Buffet, there’s not much going on here. But Christ sees beyond the size and utility of the giving, to the size of the heart of the giver, and so to her willingness to give all she has and is. Such generosity, even in her predicament, reflected an unwavering trust in God and his providence rather than in material things, as Jesus had always counselled.
Jesus loves the widow for her generosity, but also because it is all done so privately, with no trumpet-blast, no outward display of religiosity, no desire for worldly adulation or status. He has no time for look-at-me-look-at-me donors. Or for those who first exploit poor widows to make their fortunes and then brag about their generosity when they give some of it away.
So, there are many messages for us in this simple incident today. Give, give lots, give generously. Start with the corporal works of mercy. Like the Widow of Zarephath, care for your children and for orphans and widows, provide the needy with food, clothing and shelter, visit the sick and imprisoned, show hospitality to the stranger, bury the dead. But there are spiritual needs beyond the material. So, teach and admonish, forbear and forgive, counsel and comfort, intercede for the living, and don’t set and forget the dead but pray for them also. “Give, and you will receive,” Jesus says, “in good measure, pressed down and shaken together, running over and poured into your lap. In the measure you give, you will receive.” (Lk 6:38)
Give, then, give till it hurts, not just from what you don’t want anymore, but even from what you think you need. Give, trusting in providence. And give for the right reasons; not to be admired or remembered, but out of phil-anthropy, love for your fellow human beings, images of God. God himself was the first and greatest philanthropist, for as St Catherine of Siena said, his mad, drunk love for the very idea of us from all eternity is what brought us into existence and the world that supports us. His mad love for humanity still holds us in being every moment. His drunk love meant he willingly gave his life, his body and blood, everything he is, for our salvation (cf. Jn 3:16). And it’s the gift that keeps on giving: the κένωσις (kenosis) or self-emptying of God in his incarnation and passion is, as today’s epistle teaches, a continuing offer to take our sins on himself and save us (Heb 9:24-28).
Give, then, give lots, give for the right reasons, give out of philanthropy, above all out of a godlike love that loves “to excess.” But what can we give to God himself, to the One who literally has everything? Anything we offer him can seem as trivial as the widow’s mite. Well, as she teaches us, the greatest thing we can give God is ourselves, given for others. Our big sacrifices and little ones. And we can join them to Christ’s great act of giving both to us and to the Father on the Cross, in the Holy Eucharist. Then we really will have something to give even to the God who has—and gives—everything!