The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
November 8, 2009
Vol. 12 no. 43

Everything But...

In Finland and the Netherlands, there are no cents. By law in Finland and by voluntary agreement in Holland, all transactions are rounded up to the nearest five cents. You will not receive back your two cents’ worth, but lose or gain two or three cents, depending upon the generosity of the vendor.

Such a penniless strategy has been much discussed in Canada and the U.S. as well. Think of all the money we can save by not having to mint any more pennies. But think too of what we are going to do with all the left behind pennies! It is never easy to be rid of a penny.

Even in the first century A. D. a penny was not worth a great deal. When Jesus was watching the offering box at the Temple, a lot of givers gave noisily, loud clinking of many weighty coins. When the widow dropped in her two small coins, he could barely hear the chink. Generally, a simple system, the heavier the coin, the more it was worth. The Gospel identifies the coin as a lepton which is worth 1/128 of a denarius. A denarius was equivalent to a day’s wage. Two leppa therefore were worth a penny, as the passage reads. The average pay for labour dawn to dusk was therefore around $.64 per day. The King James Version famously calls these coins “mites” which together make up a “farthing.” Won’t buy much.

Despite the use of numbers here, this story is not mathematical. We are not calculating the widow’s percentage of assets in comparison to the rich guys’ noisy contributions, but any comparison would not be kind to the rich. It is a matter of soul and spirit. The widow had so little it was easy to let go of what she had for the common good. The capacity of her soul was discernibly larger than the richest person. Is this stewardship?