32nd Sunday in ordinary time. Today’s readings: 1 Kings 17:10-16, Psalms 146: 7, 8-9, 9-10, Hebrews 9: 24-28, Mark 12: 38-44.

Carlos Mesters, the Carmelite biblical scholar and liberation theologian, in A lógica do Amor (1986) discusses the contemporary experience of God’s absence, proverbially expressed as “the death of God”. According to Mesters, “in conjunction to the ‘death of God’, something has died within the human person, without the latter being aware of the dynamic movements of one’s interiority, or even what is it that which had died within”.

Taking as a point of departure the biblical cycle of the Prophet Elijah, Mesters points out that this is symptomatic of a faith crisis. Moreover he warns that today, Church dogma and doctrine fail to makes sense to our contemporaries because these are seemingly far off from the day-to-day lived experience of men and women living in unprecedented sociopolitical changes and deep cultural transformations.

Mesters’ approach is that of reading sacred metanarratives, starting from the present human experience and condition. In this process, a double empowerment takes place: the Word of God becomes alive and effectual whilst the concrete lived experience becomes enlightened. Here, the human person is not merely the receptacle of divine revelation, but becomes indeed the revelation of God’s being and action in concrete human history. For instance, he rereads the cycle of Elijah from this new perspective, turning to the present context.

Elijah, was living in the 10th and ninth century BCE, where new political allegiances were being formed, bringing economic prosperity but paving the way to syncretistic religious practices with the high price of corrupting the soul of God’s people. A radical transformation takes place in the prophet of God, when encountering the poor pagan widow of Zarephtah. The prophet – who in the name of his Lord, the “God who lives”, brought death with his prophetic word sealing the heavens against rain for three years – had to come to terms with the generous and heroic hospitality of a pagan widow who becomes in practice the true prophet of the living God, giver of life: “the jar of flour did not go empty, nor the jug of oil run dry”.

Here one might say that it is the prophet who becomes evangelised from an unexpected individual living in Jezabel’s homeland. Similarly, in the gospel, the widow who “from her poverty, has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood” to the temple’s treasury, for its upkeep and for the sustenance of the poor, becomes a prophetic sign. This treasury was considered to be God’s treasury.

The coffers had trumpet-like funnels that heightened the sound of coins landing in the chest. Hence, Jesus hints at the prideful ostentation by the rich who “put in large sums”, pretending perhaps to be a reflection of God lavishing immeasurable gifts from the divine treasury. On the contrary it is the unnoticed poor widow, whose pennies going down the coffers make no sound, who becomes the true revelation of God. Only Jesus is able to capture this revelation calling the attention of his disciples to observe, with a contemplative eye, God’s presence and action in the widow.

Only Jesus is able to capture this revelation calling the attention of his disciples to observe, with a contemplative eye, God’s presence and action in the widow

In the letter to the Hebrews, given to us as the second reading in today’s liturgy, Jesus is the revelation of God’s salvific and redemptive action, as he entered into the true divine sanctuary not made by human hands. God does not reveal himself in the pompous and glaring religious practices and rituals, aesthetically appealing as these may be, but which are mere illusory copies of the real. God is present in the peripheral and unaccounted little ones in and through whom the ongoing story of salvation continues to be written.