Jesus contrasts scribes with widows in this Sunday’s Gospel. It is a contrast between legal scholars who are socially honored and legal slaves who are socially dishonored. Jesus is not necessarily praising the widow’s almsgiving but he is certainly lamenting the payment scribes coerce out of her. The widow’s mite or penny is a payment of a forced Temple Tax which supported the scribes in a lavish lifestyle. Jesus shows how the existence of the scribes causes the problem of the widow. “Beware of the scribes who like … greetings in the marketplaces, seats of honor in synagogues, and places of honor at banquets. They devour the houses of widows.”
From ancient times onward, legal scholars, in the name of a deity, have codified women’s dependence on their society’s elites. The elites include wealthy men who arrange for women, widows especially, to live lives of insecurity. The arranged insecurity includes routine violations such as arranged aka forced marriage / remarriage, harassment, intimidation, over-work, prohibitions against speaking in public, male ‘inheritors’ laying claim to sexual rights over women, theft of women’s goods, and social exclusion of women. The arranged insecurity also includes life-threatening violations such as denial of health care, denial of social protection, eviction from or seizure of their homes, extreme poverty unto starvation, sexual assault, and murder. It is horrendous that women, widows especially, are ignored by politicians and made to suffer. It is more horrendous that politicians arrange for women to lead insecure lives early on thus forcing them to lead insecure lives later on. Across the world scribal types arrange legal and social norms that work against girls. Girls grow up in families that absorb these norms and thus deny girls having a voice, an education, any payment for work, or access to health care. Often times it is to ensure that a male child does have all these things. Once a girl is traded in a property switch called an arranged marriage she experiences the same disempowered life. Should her husband die, she still has no voice, no education, no payment for work, no health care. She has none of these things because the circumstances of widows across the world are arranged from when they are girls as one of systematic disempowerment.
Every widow starts life as a girl of might; a human being who has a right to life, health care, equality, education, food, paid work, communication, legal protection, property, and freedom. Many women are helping to empower girls of all ages to secure these rights. They include Ann Cotton founder and president of Campaign for Female Education (Camfed); Margaret Owen founder of Empowering Widows in Development (EWD) that represents over 50 grassroots widows groups world-wide; Malala Yousafzai Nobel Prize winning advocate for girls human rights, the many Girl Ambassadors for Human Rights begun by Matilda Joslyn Gage; every Head Start teacher in the U.S., and every mother and father who arrange loving and secure lives to empower their young girls of might.
Prayer: Spirit of Truth, open our eyes to the consequences of our beliefs and actions upon others.
Question: Who are the girls I’m helping to grow into secure women?
November 8, 2015 Gospel Mark 12:41-44 Thirty-Second Sunday In Ordinary Time
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