Using the Wisdom of the Widow When Making Decisions

​Father John Jimenez has spent his entire career serving others. For the last 20 years, Father John Jimenez has been pastor, teacher, and chaplain in the service of the Archdiocese of San Francisco.

Among his many teachings, the lesson of the widow is one that is very appropriate during these trying times. A time when civil conflict and a health crisis ask everyone to reflect on what is important-sacrifice for the greater good. The widow appears in Jesus’ teachings as a person of sacrifice.

According to biblical teachings, two of his disciples see the widow placing a very small offering into a plate and comment on the paltriness of this offering to Jesus. Jesus explains that it was not so much the amount she placed in the offering but that her sacrifice was great in giving it.

The pastor references the widow in a Veteran’s Day service that was about asking people to sacrifice in the same way that the widow did. The sermon opens with an explanation of the widow’s teachings, which is to reject material comfort, personal vanity, and ambition and replace these desires with freedom and sacrifice.

The lesson then compares the sacrifice of the widow with that the soldiers throughout history who have made a sacrifice that would ultimately lead to freedom. Living through the same spirit of poverty as the widow in the Bible, the soldiers exchange the poverty associated with lack of wealth with the poverty associated with comfort-little food, sleep, or rest.

The sermon segues into talking about technology and how it feeds into human avarice and exploitation. An “expanding bubble of desire,” technology facilitates the mistreatment of people (eviction of families, mass shootings, and other events), and all of this is through social media and other channels.

Of everything he says in honor of the service of veterans, though, he asks that people remember the widow, and her lesson to not worship the things symbolic of power and money. Instead, he asks everyone to seek worship in God’s temple.