What a stark contrast we have in this Sunday's Gospel! On the one hand, the pompous scribe who parades around taking everything he can get - praise, honor, respect, and even the savings of poor widows; and on the other hand, the poor widow, whom our Lord observes, who gives away everything she has. And Jesus upholds to His disciples the widow as the one to be emulated, that it is her actions that point to true love.

Self-giving love, self-sacrificing love - as our Lord puts it in today's Gospel: But she, from her poverty, has contributed all that she has, her whole livelihood - self-giving love is the center, the heart of the Christian life. Self-giving love is God's only motivation: there is nothing He needs from us; God doesn't love us because of what He can get from us. Self-giving love, self-sacrificing love, love which desires to give itself away to the other, to the Beloved, is the only reason God the Father sent His Son into the world. Self-giving love is the only reason the Son offered Himself on the Cross for our salvation and redemption. Self-giving love is the only reason why the Father and the Son send the Holy Spirit to dwell in the hearts of all who believe. And self-giving love is our only true happiness as human beings, as men and women made in the Image and Likeness of God. If God is, in His very being, self-giving, self-sacrificing love, then you and I, as persons created in His Image and Likeness, are perfected (we become the persons God intends us to be) by self-giving love, to the degree that we give ourselves away to others in love - first to God and then to our neighbor.

Now, I think there can be four typical human reactions to this notion that self-giving love, self-sacrificing love is perfective of the human being, that it constitutes that heart, the center of who we are as persons made in the image and likeness of God. I like to call these four reactions the cynical, the sadomasochistic, the cowardly, and the self-centered! The cynic, hearing about self-giving, self-sacrificing love, snorts and says: "Great! That might be fine for an hour on a Sunday morning, but it's not gonna put bread on my table! The world's too harsh, too rough, to go around giving and not taking. Nice thought - but what's it got do with reality?"

The sadomasochist - we can also refer to this as the "human doormat syndrome" - when the sadomasochist hears that self-giving love is the center of Christian life smiles inwardly, anticipating new opportunities for everyone to walk all over him or her, but then making sure that others suffer in return for their mistreatment.

The cowardly response is to slink away in fear - shuddering to think of the suffering that giving of oneself to another entails. The coward counts the cost first: "It's too high! It's too high! I'll get hurt in the process!"

When the self-centered person hears that self-giving love is the center of Christian life, he immediately twists the whole notion of love back on to himself and starts calculating the benefits that will accrue from doing this, dreaming of the praise and admiration from others.

The cynic, the sadomasochist, the coward, and the self-centered - I don't know about you, but I can find a little of all four in myself! So where are you and I to find the remedy for these tendencies within us? Where shall we find the strength to love as we have been loved first by God? How are we to imitate the widow in today's Gospel, who "gave from her want, everything she had to live on?"

As in all things, God does not expect us to do it by own efforts. The love that you and I are to give is only the love that we have first received from Him. He Himself has left us an example, but not just an example to be imitated by us. He gives us the perfect act of self-giving love, self-sacrificing love; Jesus unites us to His perfect sacrifice to the Father for the salvation of the world. Here in the Eucharist, we are conformed, we are made one with God's own self-giving love. Here is the antidote, every time we gather for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, for our selfishness, for our cowardice, for our cynicism. Here, as our very Food and Drink, we are given the love which we are called to pass on to others, a love which is not diminished by giving it away, a love that only multiplies the more lavishly it is spent, the more widely it is scattered.

Our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, in his first encyclical letter to the Church, Deus Caritas Est or God is Love, had this to say:

(Jesus') death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against Himself in which He gives Himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form. By contemplating the pierced side of Christ (cf. 19:37), we can understand the starting-point of this Encyclical Letter: "God is love" (1 Jn 4:8). It is there that this truth can be contemplated. It is from there that our definition of love must begin. In this contemplation the Christian discovers the path along which his life and love must move.
The Eucharist draws us into Jesus' act of self-oblation. More than just statically receiving the incarnate (Word), we enter into the very dynamic of His self-giving. The imagery of marriage between God and Israel is now realized in a way previously inconceivable: it had meant standing in God's presence, but now it becomes union with God through sharing in Jesus' self-gift, sharing in His Body and Blood. The sacramental "mysticism", grounded in God's condescension towards us, operates at a radically different level and lifts us to far greater heights than anything that any human mystical elevation could ever accomplish.

In the Eucharist, you and I, the Holy Father says, enter into "the very dynamic" of Christ's self-giving. In other words, "Come to Me, all you who are weary and find life burdensome, and I will refresh you. Take My yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart. Your souls will find rest. For my yoke is easy and my burden light," says the Lord.