The Two Tiny Coins

The coats and branches had been swept off the road into Jerusalem, and every day that week Jesus went back to the temple. Every day the leaders lined up to trap him. "Should we pay taxes to Caesar or not?" "Which commandment matters most?" Each trap they set, he stepped right over, and the crowd listened to him gladly.

Then Jesus pointed at the teachers of the law, who were sweeping across the courtyard in their long, fine robes.

"Watch out for them," he said. "They like to walk around in long robes and be greeted in the marketplace. They like the best seats in the synagogue and the places of honour at feasts. They swallow up widows' houses, and then they pray long prayers to be seen."

(A widow is a woman whose husband has died. In those days she often had no one to earn money for her, and no one to stand up for her when a clever man took what was hers.)

After that, Jesus sat down across from the offering boxes, where people brought money for God's house, and he watched how they gave.

There was plenty to watch. The boxes had mouths shaped like trumpets, and coins tumbled down them with a rattle and a ring. A rich man would tip in a whole bagful. Clatter, clatter, CLANG! Heads turned. (If you wanted all of Jerusalem to know how generous you were, this was the place to stand.)

Then a woman came through the crowd in a worn, plain dress. She was a widow, and she was poor. She opened her hand over the box, and two copper coins slid down the trumpet.

Tink. Tink.

They were the smallest coins anyone made in that land, no bigger than a fingernail. It took both of them together to make one penny. A worker earned more than a hundred of them for one day in the fields. Nobody turned around.

Jesus had seen. He called his disciples over. "Truly I tell you," he said, "this poor widow has put in more than all the others."

The disciples looked at the box. They looked at the rich men in their rings. More?

"They all gave out of what they had left over," Jesus said. "But she is poor, and she has put in everything she had. All she had to live on."

She had not kept back one coin for tomorrow's bread. She walked home with empty hands. Jesus did not call her back, and as far as the Bible tells us, she never knew he had been watching.

As they were leaving the temple, one of the disciples gazed up at its walls. "Teacher, look! What huge stones! What buildings!"

"All these great buildings?" said Jesus. "Not one stone here will be left on another. Every one will be thrown down."

The rich men's gifts had made plenty of noise, and the walls their money helped build would fall one day. Nobody remembers how much a single one of them gave. But Jesus made sure the widow's two coins were remembered, and people have been telling about them ever since. He counted the way God counts, by what is left in the hand afterward, and the widow had nothing left.

He knew what that costs, because he had come to Jerusalem to do the same thing. Within days he would give all he had to live on, his own life, for the very people who were plotting against him in that courtyard, and for widows, and for teachers in long robes too.

In a courtyard full of people watching the rich, the Son of God was the one watching her.