Our Lord is sitting by the Temple watching all the people coming and going, putting their offerings into the box. Some of them were making quite a show of it, no doubt, so that everyone would know how much they had put in. But there, among them all, was a little old lady, rather shabbily dressed, who slipped in her twopence halfpenny when no one was looking. But the Lord saw her. And he got terribly excited about it. “She’s put in more than all the rest put together!” he exclaims.

This little old lady did not realise that she was doing anything spectacular; nothing could have been further from her mind. She did not want to draw attention to herself, because she knew that what she was giving was not worth very much, it was not going to repair the Temple roof or get them a new organ or even pay for the Boy Scouts’ Annual Outing. The Temple authorities might well think it was a confounded nuisance having to count all the small change put in by people like her. But she had given all she had, knowing that it was not much, knowing that she was not going to solve anyone’s problems. And surely the Lord recognised in her a kindred spirit. She was doing the same kind of thing that he was doing. He was not solving the world’s problems in any sense that the world could understand, he was not reforming society or abolishing poverty”the poor you will always have with you” was his comment on that (Mt. 26:11) he was not doing any of the things some modern Christians think he should have been doing. And many people considered him a nuisance. But he was giving himself, he was giving all he had got, he was giving his very life.

Blessed are the poor! How easily we take that always to mean somebody else. Yet if we want to be with God, we must learn to hear it as “blessed are we who are poor”, we who have not got anything very impressive to give to anybody, whose giving may very well be rather a nuisance, but who still have not given up giving. Who knows? Our giving of ourselves in all our poverty may one day bring some joy to somebody else who is poor, who is not calculating, not trying to repair a church roof. God invites us into this conspiracy of the poor, making himself its head, giving himself in poverty and weakness, knowing that if we will only receive that humble gift of his, it will transform everything. If we are prepared to be poor enough to learn and to appreciate the manner of God’s giving, we shall find in that poverty the seed of all perfection.

–Simon Tugwell, Prayer