Rick Cowan is a fellow pastor I am friends with on Facebook. The other day he wrote this excellent comment about the widow.
If the widow in Mark 12 ever came to our church with her last few dollars and attempted to put it in the offering plate, my first reaction would be to try with great effort to discourage her from doing so. I would tell her to keep her money and suggest to her that it is the church that should be giving to her, and not she to the church. I would try to understand her motivation and make sure that she was not giving out of superstition, obligation or under the mistaken notion that by doing so she was earning favour with God. But, in all of this... I might also need to consider the possibility that it is not she who has the wrong understanding of the offering, but me.
What if this woman came to give her last few dollars, not to the church, but to God? What if she came to give, not to support the ministry per se, but to express her trust in her Lord? What if her coming was born out of a sweet, intimate, dependency upon Him? What if she came to worship God through absolute and total trust in Him? What if she was not motivated by religious obligation but rather a sincere, faith-filled reliance upon God? If she came for these reasons, I would have to acknowledge that she did not misunderstand the purpose of the offering - but I had. I would be the mistaken one, I would be the faithless one, I would be the one that attempted to prohibit her from worshiping her Lord.
If the above were true, I would not discourage her. I would not prevent her from giving - even though the church has no need of her money. Because, giving is not primarily about the needs of the church, it is about the worship of God.
So, I would not discourage her, rather, I would watch her give, and stand in awe in the presence of tremendous faith.
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