The Widow’s Sacrifice
Image by doug88888 via Flickr “All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on” (Luke 21:4). As Jesus was speaking about the oppression of widows by the teachers of the Law, He looked up at the great bronze “trumpets” in the temple courtyard, in which people put their gifts. The rich were putting in their gifts and Jesus saw a widow slipping two mites into one of these receptacles. A mite was a copper coin, the smallest coin in the Jewish currency. It was worth about one tenth of one cent. The amount of money she gave was minuscule. It is interesting that the rules of the rabbis forbade giving just one mite, because the expense of administering such a gift was more than the gift itself. Thus, the minimum acceptable offering was two mites, exactly what the widow gave. Jesus was moved. He said this widow had put in more than all the rich. Jesus did not mean this in a quantitative sense, but in a qualitative on...