This week’s gospel continues the story of Jesus and his disciples sitting opposite the treasury of the temple and watching the coffers fill up. Jesus calls his disciples to notice a widow who gives her last two cents (Mark 12.38-44).

Instead, the disciples notice the size of the stones and grandeur of the building around them. It’s safe to say that the disciples lost their focus on the widow. In the midst of such grandeur — and the temple was grand — it’s easy to become distracted and see only the marvel before us while averting our eyes from the things that we’d rather not see — like a widow adding her last coins to the coffer that is intended to provide support for people like her.

In calling attention to the widow, and again in telling the disciples the hard truth that nothing they see is going to last, Jesus is reminding them (and us!) of something crucial: it’s easy to lose sight of what matters in our efforts to build and preserve the world as we know it and want it to be. And what matters to Jesus is the people — not the wanna-be saviors who say “I am the one” — but the widow, the orphans, the strangers, the lost ones, the struggling ones, the desperate ones, the scared ones. The ones who are supposed to be served by our instutitions and structures, who instead are easily forgotten or ignored as we lose focus on people in order to preserve what we have built.

Jesus will not forget them. Jesus will not abandon them. Jesus will keep seeing them and keep refocusing the attention of his followers. Jesus will keep provoking us to love these neighbors . . . as he has loved us all.

As we “hold fast to the confession of our hope” and God’s faithfulness to God’s promises made visible in Jesus, Hebrews 10 reminds us “to consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds.” And in so doing, of never allowing ourselves and each other to lose sight of our neighbors.