Mark 12:38-44
November 11, 2018
I.
Jesus is in the Temple with his disciples. As they are walking around, Jesus sees some of the functionaries and officials of the Temple, in their professional vestments. And he points them out. “Watch out for these scribe types,” he says. “They like to walk around here in their long, flowing robes, and to be greeted with respect in the market places, and to have the best seats in the synagogues, and the places of honor at banquets.”
We know what and who he is talking about. Not too many of us see religious officials in impressive vestments these days; even Roman Catholic bishops tend just to wear black suits. But other kinds of officials? The kind that our society values and reveres? The men who wear 3000 dollar suits and work on Wall Street? The ones who land the 1500 dollar box seats at Yankee Stadium? The ones to whom the market is engineered to be kindest? Who easily get the choicest tables at the most expensive restaurants? Who always fly first-class? That’s the analogy today. They have made it, they are a success, and they want us to know it.
Jesus is watching them. “Don’t be impressed,” he says. “Certainly do not emulate them or aspire to be like them. In reality they are devouring widows’ houses.” Their wealth is built on the backs of the poor people who do the work. The people who pay high taxes, high interest rates, high fees and tolls; the people who have to pay someone to cash their paychecks; the people who make minimum wage if they are employed at all. The people who actually do the work, that makes a society work as well as it does.
The biblical shorthand for such people is often “widows and orphans.” They represent people with no regular means of support, which in Jesus’ time would have been a connection to a man: a landlord, a father, a brother, or a husband, even a son. Men generally owned everything in those days… and pretty much in these days as well. “Widows and orphans” are people who have lost their connection to the owner class who control the wealth.
Jesus has already thrown out the more obvious manifestations of the commercial debasement of the Temple, the people changing money and selling animals for sacrifice, all at a profit. Now he is observing the ones behind that whole system who fed on it. The ones who “devour widows’ houses,” which is to say foreclose on the homes of people who cannot pay their rent.
These are the religious professionals who “say long prayers for the sake of appearance,” says Jesus, which adds tremendous insult to injury because of the hypocrisy. These are people who are supposedly devoted followers of the Bible, the Torah, God’s Law! The same book that was written from the perspective of escaped slaves and refugees, and over and over again, says stuff like love your neighbor, redistribute wealth downward, welcome the stranger, show mercy and love kindness, be fair even to birds and trees, and so forth. How does someone whose job it is to teach and profess this particular faith end up devouring widows’ houses?
II.
“They will receive the greater condemnation,” says Jesus. And what he means is, I think, that if we let our egocentricity and selfishness rule us, even in the name of law and religion, we separate ourselves from God so profoundly that we can’t perceive God’s love at all. All we see is our own false and empty glory reflected back at us, which is nothing but a shadow. We unwittingly condemn ourselves to the darkness that we in our ignorance were happy to impose on others. We make ourselves into the abandoned and forsaken ones we fed off of.
Jesus brings his disciples over to the place in the Temple where people presented their tithes and offerings. And they sit down and observe.
People come in, mostly men because that’s who generally has any money, and they enter and check-in at the desk and probably get some kind of receipt, and they leave bags or boxes of coins. The more wealthy people perhaps make a bigger deal about it, showing how not only are they doing their civic and religious duty, but they are making sure everyone knows whose wealth is keeping this institution going. Nobody is ever happy about paying taxes; but the pain is kind of mitigated by these other factors from which they get at least a little reward and solace.
Then a woman comes in who is obviously a poor widow, on her own, paying her own taxes, doing her own civic and religious duty. Jesus spots her right off. “Watch this,” he says to his disciples, as she quietly and unobtrusively drops two tiny copper coins in the box, which together are worth a mere penny. Nobody notices. And she hurries back out of the Temple.
Jesus motions for his disciples to come closer so they can hear him over the echoing noise in the cavernous space. “Truly I tell you,” he says, “this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”
Now, most of the time this is interpreted as Jesus commending her for her amazing, selfless generosity. But in the context of what he has just said about wealthy scribes devouring widow’s houses, it is more likely that he is lifting her up as an example of just that.
In other words, the Lord is angry and disgusted at what they have all just witnessed, which is a poor widow being compelled to lose her only remaining excuse for wealth to prop up the expensive pomposity of the scribes, not to mention this magnificent edifice of the Temple. Jesus will immediately go on in chapter 13 to predict the destruction of the Temple as a pointless and counterproductive institution that God will not let stand! God does not have much patience for any system that allows for the devouring of widows’ houses. Such systems and institutions inevitably collapse of their own corrupt weight. Always.
III.
The thing that occurs to me about this passage is that Jesus apparently can’t count. By any quantitative metric the 1 penny given by the woman is not “more” than the thousands of dollars that were given by everyone else. In the larger scheme of things, a single penny is an insignificant, barely perceptible drop in the proverbial bucket.
I’m just being a little facetious, of course. Jesus simply means that her tiny donation means more to her, it has more of an impact on her life, frankly it hurts more, than the donations of other, richer people.
Jesus is exposing the injustice of the practice of what we call a “flat-tax,” that is, having everyone, regardless of wealth, pay the same percentage. If you have a million dollars it is easy to scrape by on the $900,000 you have left after paying your 10%. But for most of us, 10% would be a considerable hit requiring us to cut back on some essentials.
But what Jesus is so upset about here is the hypocrisy and cruelty of the religious authorities in driving people like this poor widow into destitution in the name of religion, while the self-important authorities and functionaries do very well. I personally get about as focused and angry as I get when I hear of ministers or presbytery officials pulling down the 6-figure salaries. I know where that money comes from. I have personally known actual widows who tithed to the church voluntarily, and lived very simply, to put it nicely. In my first church there was an elderly woman who was regularly audited because the IRS could not believe someone with so little actually gave to the church as much as she claimed.
We will see that in the gospel community that Jesus’ disciples set up in the Book of Acts, the widows, and presumably others with no way of gaining income, receive support. It is such a central and important task of the church that they have to institute a whole new order of ministry to attend to it: the deacons.
The church is called to model the practice, which first appears in the Sabbath laws in the Torah, of redistribution downward. Give what you have; take what you need. That’s the way we might summarize the economics of Jesus. That is what the church even now continues, at its best, to embody.
That is what stewardship is about. It is fitting that Jesus spends a lot of time in these autumn lectionary passages talking about money and wealth. Because this is the season in the church when we are preparing budgets for the coming calendar year. This is when we are most explicit about how we can support God’s mission with the wealth God has entrusted to us.
IV.
If it helps to lift up the widow in this story as a positive example, and ask ourselves what we would have to give for it to be "more than everyone,” or “all we have to live on,” then do that. If it helps to remember how Jesus is jamming into reverse a system that bled the poor and the working people in order to keep the wealthy and powerful comfortable, then do that.
At the end of the day Jesus witnesses to that verse from Psalm 24 that I repeat almost every Sunday, about how the whole creation and all people belong to God. We are therefore responsible to organize ourselves after God’s pattern, and see that God’s abundance is shared, distributed, allocated, and given, with generosity and grace, where it is needed. If it all belongs to God, and it does, then our only economic question is how we can best devote what has been placed in our care to the service of discipleship. How can we do what God wants with what belongs to God?
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