So here we are, the first Sunday of stewardship
season, where our board—which, for some obscure and (likely) boring reason, we
Presbyterians call the Session—where the Session comes up with a budget and
then we talk about ways to fill it, most usually, of course, from pledges. And
it’s kinda like pledge season on National Public Radio, and it can be just as
annoying—not here,
of course—with people asking for money, money, money . . . and why is that, you
may ask? Well, unlike public radio, which gets about half its budget from the
gummint, we get virtually all
our budget through donations. A little something called separation of church
and state, don’t you know.
And so we have our own pledge season here at Greenhills Community
Church, Presbyterian, only unlike NPR, we only do it once a year, and isn’t
that nice of your Session who loves you? And instead of thank-you gifts like
crank-powered emergency radios and CDs of piano players nobody’s ever heard of,
we get to have a warm, well-lit place to gather for worship and professionals
like Brad to help lead it. And this morning’s passage is the one that a lot of
pastors—including yours truly—have used at pledge, er, stewardship season over the
years because it seems
so perfect: here
are some rich folks, parading past the offering plate, plonking in ginormous
sums of money, making a joyful, clanking noise, and here’s this poor
widow-woman, hobbling up to the pot and throwing in her two pennies. And it’s
obvious that Mark wants to paint a sharp contrast between the rich folks—for
whom, remember, it is harder to access the Kingdom than a camel to get through
the needle’s eye—he wants to set up a contrast between the rich folks and the
widow, whom he makes sure we know is poor.
Now. Widows didn’t have to be poor, you understand: both Jewish
and Roman law allowed women to inherit their husband’s wealth. And if a woman
had sons and/or a father-in-law, they were expected to care for her after her
husband passed. But for every woman whose husband left a sizable estate there
were a hundred thousand
who were living from her husband’s hand to mouth before the old boy passed, and now had no-one
to provide. It was such a common condition that widows, along with orphans—as
in the phrase “widows and orphans”—are code words, verbal shorthand, for the
unfortunate. There are about eighty references to widows in the scriptures, and
God's determination to care for them is frequently noted. In the Letter of
James it is spelled out: caring for ‘widows and orphans in their distress” is
seen as a hallmark of “religion that is pure and undefiled before God.”
So Jesus is dealing with a loaded symbol here,
and Mark calling her “poor” is almost redundant, but it certainly piles on the pathos. And she gives two
pitiful, little coins—we translate the Greek here as “pennies”—and lo! it’s all
she has, and Jesus
makes it very clear what the point of this lesson is: The rich, he says, have
“contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in
everything she had, all she had to live on.” Holy moley! That’s faith, that’s dedication, she throws in all she has! And note:
because she’s done this, she’s “put in more than all those who are contributing
to the treasury.”
Of course, this shouldn’t surprise anybody who’s been paying
attention as we’ve worked our way through Mark . . . the last rich guy Jesus talked
to asked what he’d have to do to inherit eternal life, and when Jesus told him
he’d have to give up everything, he went away sadly because he had a lot of stuff; Bartimaeus
throws away his cloak—surely all he has—before he’s ever healed, and now the widow has given it all
away, to the evident satisfaction of Jesus. So we oughta be used to that pronouncement
by now, but it’s still shocking: we’re supposed to give up everything? Really? How are
we supposed to eat? How are we supposed to support our families? For that matter, if everybody’s
given up all they own, who’s going to take care of all those widows and orphans
God’s so concerned about? And finally, how do you reconcile Jesus’ commendation
of it with his supposed compassion: does he really
want the woman to starve?
On the surface of it, it seems cut and dried.
The rich man is told to give up all he has and the poor widow is commended when
she does. Pretty open and shut. One way of getting around it is if we assume
Jesus’ command to the rich guy is a specific deal, just for that particular man
at that particular time, and therefore can’t be generalized. But what possible
thing could they have in common—the rich guy, the blind guy, and the poor
widow—that would make giving up all they had the right thing to do, and at the
same time not being right for everyone?
Of course, we could fall back on that old
standby of spiritualizing everything, saying piously that Jesus doesn’t mean we
have to give up our money,
our material goods . . . no. What he means is we’ve got to give up our ego, our
pride, our self-regard, things like that. And indeed, elsewhere he seems to say
just that, but not in these stories. In these
stories it’s very clear: the rich guy is to sell all his stuff, give the money
to the poor, and follow Jesus. Likewise for the widow: she puts in two very
corporal, very solid, coins, they aren’t spiritual, they aren’t some bad habit
she’s giving up for Lent. It’s money she can buy food with and it’s all she has.
You know, it would be easy to see these
folks—the wealthy lawyer on one hand and the poor widow on the other—as
symbolic of two socio-economic strata in first century Palestine: the extremely
poor he extremely wealthy. In fact, there were only two “classes” in those
days: rich and poor, and there was nothing in between. To be specific, there
was no middle class—that’s a particularly modern phenomenon: an entire stratum
of people who have (a) disposable income and (b) the time to enjoy it. And in
first century Palestine, there was no such animal. Either you had plenty of
money, much more than you needed, or you had just barely enough, and in many
cases, not even that.
That’s why it’s hard to place ourselves in this
story, at least class-wise. Because make no mistake: this is a story about
class. It’s why Mark—and we—put the two episodes back to back: we’re supposed to associate the
rich folks who put enormous sums into the treasury with those scribes who walk
around in long robes. You know who they are: they love to be greeted with
respect in the marketplaces, and have the best seats in the synagogues and
places of honor at banquets. Scribes were the lawyers of the day, and there was
only one law: the law of Moses, the Torah. And what Jesus is saying is that
they use that law to “devour widow’s houses”—in modern parlance, perhaps,
foreclose on their mortgages when they can no longer pay. And they do this and then come to
church on Sunday—oops! I mean to synagogue
on the Sabbath—to
say long prayers and show just how pious they are. They’re gonna get theirs, saith the Lord.
And does the poor widow see the scribe who
devoured her home flap by in his long robe, chest puffed out as he drops a boat-load of coin into the
copper pot—clang!—after first making sure everyone’s looking? That’s what Mark
implies . . . that the widow and those folks are related by oppression, and so
the interesting question emerges: is the widow,
in turn, making a statement of her own
by publicly throwing all she has into the pot? Remember, it is the temple treasury, the
money is going straight not to God, but to the institution that employs those
scribes who’ve devoured her home. Is she saying “There! See what you’ve done!
Here are my last two pennies! Take it all!” Is it a protest against the order of things, the powers
that be, the system?
And this, in turn, calls into question why Jesus commends her: not for giving
up all she has and facing imminent starvation—why would he want her to
starve?—but for standing up to a system that uses the law to enrich a few at
the expense of the many?
You know . . . I’ve said this before, but
Mahatma Gandhi wrote that he learned all he knew about non-violent resistance
from Jesus, from the gospels, and he knew that one of the most effective ways
of resisting the oppressor is to ridicule them, ‘cause they can’t stand to be
made fun of. And here these fine, upstanding citizens are, parading by,
dropping their coinage into the pot, which everybody knows they can afford—it’s
why Jesus reminds us it’s from their abundance—and
then the widow hobbles by, throws in her pennies, which everybody knows is all she has, and
does it ridicule those who have paced solemnly by, does it send a strong,
condemnatory message? Those long-robed scribes certainly will receive the
greater condemnation, but it won’t be from God. It’ll be from anyone standing
by, and in the small town that is Jerusalem, word will get around.
Well. Where do we go from here? This passage
certainly works very well at pledge time, and being that it is that time, we should note
that it is so. And I’ll say what I always
say: we’re all adults here, we know
that to keep the lights and heat on, we need income. And the best way to do
that—for the church, which needs to plan, and for us, who need a goal—is to pledge for the
upcoming year.
But we shouldn’t lose sight of the more fundamental
fact, that this is a fable, a tale of the haves and have nots, the firsts and
lasts of the earth, and we know what Jesus always said: those with means have
their rewards right here on earth, and the first shall be last and the last
first. Amen.
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