Sacrifice everything.

Jesus is pleased with those who can renounce everything for him.

We are preparing for the end of the church year. We are living the days of the Passion. A look at nature speaks of a new season of the year, winter. Inadvertently, questions come to our minds: Have we done all we can in our relationship with God? Have we given God all that we were obligated to provide? Nature has become orphaned. She has given us everything that has been produced. Like an echo, the word “all” carries to us today (Mk 12:44).

The last sentence of today’s Gospel emphasizes the meaning of the word “all” when the Lord Jesus spoke words of praise about the woman, the poor widow, saying, “In her poverty, she gave all that she had, her whole livelihood” (Mk 12:44).

There is something of dignity in the woman’s gesture, something that disheartens the contemporary man—the man of the consumer who would only like to take and give nothing of himself. The words “everything” and sacrificing “everything” today shock and, to say the least, astonish me. The man who chooses to do so today is considered a madman or a freak. Jesus evaluates it differently. Today’s Gospel presents three categories of people.

First, these are the learned in the Scriptures, the scribes, the consumer people. They only want to take. We know that they demanded respect, honors, titles, first places, and more from others. The second group of people are those who really give a lot, but only enough to have enough left over for themselves. On the contrary, the third is the group of people bewitched by the word “everything”. They share what they have, the last piece of bread, who give everything for God, Jesus, and the other person, like the woman, the widow in the Gospel. She does not share; she gives all that she has. The Gospel wants to show us two different attitudes, when one provides only something and when one gives everything. And the woman, the widow? Her “two small coins, which is a quadrant” (Mk 12:42) helped no one. But the woman did “only” what she thought best, gave everything, and in so doing, put her life in direct dependence on God. The way of Jesus speaks of dependence on the Father. This is the way Jesus refers to as the way of true discipleship. The Gospel does not speak of social sentiment, but of surrendering one’s life to God. God wants the heart of man. Whoever submits his whole self to God makes room for love between God and man. This is not irresponsible, but it is not easy either.

What is sacrifice? A sacrifice or gift is called any offering to God in ordinary life. It is when, out of love for God, one consciously and voluntarily renounces pleasant and lawful things for the sake of one’s soul or the good of one’s brethren. What is the object of sacrifice? What does sacrifice cost us? The highest price of sacrifice is our own life. So also we understand death for Christ. Remember, for example, the martyr Maximilian Kolbe of Auschwitz, who went into the hunger bunker for fellow prisoner Francis out of love for God.

A sacrifice dear to God can also be the renunciation of food, not only in Lent and on Fridays, the renunciation of an evening movie on TV when I use the time for my family or to read something for my soul. Giving up the benefits that belong to me is also a gift. Renunciation is meant to help us overcome our weaknesses, faults, or sins.