Mark 12:41-44 And Jesus sat over against the treasury, and beheld how the people cast money into the treasury: and many that were rich cast in much.… The Saviour noticed not merely, the fact or acts of contribution, but also the wonderfully diversified modes in which the acts exhibited themselves. Mode is inseparable from act, and, when outward, reveals the inward essence of the act. We may suppose that our Saviour looked in, through the diversified modes that struck His outward eye, to the diversified characters of the contributors, as they passed in succession before Him. If so, it would be with far more interest and innerliness than was ever manifested by Lavater, and with an intuition that was unerring. "On Sundays, after the sermon," says the poet Goethe, "it was Lavater's duty, as an ecclesiastic, to hold the short-handled, velvet alms bag before each one who went out, and to bless as he received the pious gift. Now, on a certain Sunday he proposed to himself, without looking at the several persons as they dropped in their offerings, to observe only their hands, and by them silently to judge of the forms of their donors. Not only the shape of the finger, but its peculiar action in dropping the gift, was attentively noted by him, and he had much to communicate to me on the conclusions he had formed." As the idiosyncrasy and form of the whole body was revealed to Lavater's eye by the form and action of the fingers, so the idiosyncrasy and moral condition of every soul were unveiled to our Saviour's gaze, as He noticed "how" the offerings were cast in. (J. Morison, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And Jesus sat over against the treasury, and beheld how the people cast money into the treasury: and many that were rich cast in much. |
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