Getting and showing chunk of html in widget

Hello, I have copied an “empty” widget and tried to use this to get and display a large chunk of html in one of my sidebars. Upon activating the widget I get an error on this line:
return get_file_contents('./inc/the_large_chunk.html');

The entire code I added in the widget “shell” is here:

function get_thelargechunk()
    {
        return get_file_contents('./inc/the_large_chunk.html');
}
        if(foo == bar) {
            echo "nothing";
        }
         else {
            echo get_thelargechunck();
        }