It was a scene made for good people-watching. Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were placed and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury.(1) There were some who made a spectacle of their giving. Others gave in guilt or joy or obligation. Many rich people threw in large amounts. A poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a fraction of a penny. The motives of giving are as many as the people who give.
In a Wall Street Journal article titled “Charitable Explanation,” Arthur Brooks examined giving in the United States and its patterns through storm and season. In the month of December, for instance, as much as a third of the quarter-trillion dollars Americans give away each year is collected. Eighty-five million Americans participate.
Even so, giving is not a collective national trait. “While 85 million American households give away money each year to nonprofit organizations,” notes Brooks “another 30 million do not.”(2) There is a Giving America and Non-Giving America, he says. And what distinguishes them is not income. In fact, he reports, “America’s working poor give away at least as large a percentage of their incomes as the rich, and a lot more than the middle class. The charity gap is driven not by economics but by values.” Giving is apparently a matter of perspective, and this is true from America to Australia to Asia.
In the middle of his people-watching at the temple treasury, Jesus called his disciples to the scene in front him: a widow had dropped in two copper coins as she passed by the treasury, and it caught the eye of the teacher. Sandwiched between the generous gifts of the affluent, her coins would perhaps not have drawn the attention of anyone else. But Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.” (3)
