Message of Abbot Paul - Saturday 10th June 2023

It was a long and tiring journey back from Thessaloniki, leaving me with a day less to make the usual preparations for the weekend, and a very busy one at that. I’ll attach a few photographs of the Alps and also of a part of London, which I know some of you will enjoy figuring out. I was up at 3am yesterday, so I’m having difficulty keeping awake as I write these few words.

 

​I’ll just attach today’s Gospel, which is one of the loveliest stories in the Bible, the Widow’s Mite. It comes from Mark, (Mk 12: 38-44).

“In his teaching Jesus said, ‘Beware of the scribes who like to walk about in long robes, to be greeted obsequiously in the market squares, to take the front seats in the synagogues and the places of honour at banquets; these are the men who swallow the property of widows, while making a show of lengthy prayers. The more severe will be the sentence they receive.’

  He sat down opposite the treasury and watched the people putting money into the treasury, and many of the rich put in a great deal. A poor widow came and put in two small coins, the equivalent of a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, ‘I tell you solemnly, this poor widow has put more in than all who have contributed to the treasury; for they have all put in money they had over, but she from the little she had has put in everything she possessed, all she had to live on.’”

 

​Now, I went to a Welsh Grammar School, built in the 1880s “on the pennies of the poor.” How many churches, schools and hospitals throughout the world have been built on the pennies of the poor, the sum total of many widow’s mites? Jesus was right, wasn’t he, when he said that “this poor widow has put more in than all who have contributed to the treasury; for they have all put in money they had over, but she from the little she had has put in everything she possessed, all she had to live on.” May we all follow her example.