Giving Poorly
Mark 12:38-44
November 12, 2006


In business decisions, location, location, location brings about the greater impression upon the public. I was serving as the Associate Minister at my home church in downtown Baltimore, just a few blocks from the wonderful Enoch Pratt Free Library on Cathedral Street, so named because directly across from the entrance to Enoch Pratt was the Cathedral. Rather, it used to be the Cathedral, now downgraded to the Basilica.

One Lenten mid-week evening our downtown clergy conducted an ecumenical service and Lawrence Cardinal Shehan came to worship with us. I was the representative of the United Methodists in the worship service, and while Cardinal Shehan was not the only Roman Catholic clergy present, he was the senior, a very gracious and friendly man.

When it came time for the offering, he commented that the men taking the offering had worked all day and it would relieve their burden and fatigue if there were no coins in the plates, just paper. No one heard the widow’s mites ring in the coffers on that night by episcopal command. Come to think of it, how often do we hear coins clink in the plate these days, and should we be worried?

Jesus keeps surviving the onslaught of deceptive questions and not very innocent challenges by the scribes and Pharisees. After he told the one curious scribe, “You are not far from the kingdom of God,” no one dared to ask him another question. Now Jesus has the audience in the Jerusalem Temple and he is on a roll and he is hitting back hard. The scribes had been manipulating and prostituting the Scriptures in order to defeat and humiliate Jesus, yes, kill him, but that did not bother him so much as the fact that they didn’t care about keeping God alive either.

This may have been the first century, two millennia ago, but what Jesus holds up in satire and ridicule can easily be translated. Beware of scribes and teachers who love to prance around in colourful peacock robes and have people greet them as the Reverend Doctor in the Scarth Street Mall, and always sit up front where everyone sees them in their piety. The head table is the only place appropriate for them to sit at banquets. At the drop of a hat they launch into long prayers, perhaps for a fee. And, they “devour widows’ houses.” All that other stuff is the puffed-up nonsense of ego and self-importance, which can be laughed at and ignored. But devouring the house of a widow - there are no rich widows in that society - is obscene. They may think they’ve got religion, but they don’t have God on their side.

Jesus then sat down opposite the treasury and watched the offering plates fill up. This is one more occasion when an audio taped recording of Jesus’ comments would explain an awful lot. We just have to rely upon the Spirit to hear his tone of voice and where he places his emphases. There is a steady stream of givers, some quite wealthy, and we never want to discourage their large sums. It would be nice to transform their hearts and motives for giving richly, for then the kingdom would almost certainly be in our midst.

Along comes the poor widow, and for people like her there is no social assistance available, just the benevolence and assistance of male relatives. Let’s face it, when you have joined your husband’s family and your husband is gone, then you are an outsider, a stranger and an alien. “Family values” are the ethical and cultural systems that helped devour people in those days. This woman sure looks eaten up, a gaunt face, an overused garment. Her two almost worthless coins plunk audibly for all whose ears were hearing across the courtyard.

The disciples huddle around the teacher as he observes that she has put in more than all the rest who have been contributing to the treasury. It almost sounds as if she has given more than all the rest combined. In a real way she had, because you can’t give any more than your “all”, and the others, the rich ones especially, had given only fractions of themselves. The sum of the parts never equals the whole, especially when the whole is a human life.

It’s easiest now to go to town praising the extravagant, excessive giving of this woman, how she gave out of her poverty, while others gave what they didn’t need. The economic and mathematical issue is not how much you give, but how much you have left. Oh, the walls shake on Stewardship Sundays all around the church at the clinking of the two lepta, “thin ones,” against the walls of the coffer.

There is another take on what Jesus noticed sitting opposite the treasury. He knows how the system works. This woman is poor, not by her choice, but by somebody else’s choice. Along with the Regina Anti-Poverty Ministry, I can hear the voice of Jesus say (as in that wonderful old hymn), “Poverty is a disgrace, but it’s not a disgrace to be poor!”

So do you think Jesus is really cheering on this widow, who has no other human means of visible support, placing her last two coins in the offering controlled by a corrupt religious institution? And you know that the offering was supposed to be for the poor! Do you really think she received anything back?

Jesus was not a friend of the scribes and Pharisees at the temple. Is he asking us to admire a poor woman who gives her last two cents to a morally bankrupt religious institution - to an institution whose leaders he claims devour the houses of widows such as her?

What is praiseworthy about sending your last few dollars to a TV evangelist? Maybe it will buy Ted Haggard another massage so he can rant and rave about homosexuality as a ‘lifestyle choice’ in a more relaxed manner!

The widow, after all, was still going to be poor whether she kept the two coins or whether she gave them away. Holding on to them wasn’t going to change a thing, except that her soul had let go of everything through her offering. Early Christian writers urged the serious-minded among their company to like “like a poor person,” to live “poorly.” Not playing, pretending to be poor, but to literally live with the perspective that money and possessions do not define who you are. Poverty is not defined by what you don’t own or by what you owe. Jesus calls us all to be poor in spirit and blesses the poor. None of us are called to be rich, but out of poverty comes a richness, a joy we can scarcely comprehend.

There is yet one more take on this scene. Jesus is in Jerusalem for the Passover and he knows that in four days or so he will be crucified. No one else noticed this poor woman - why would Jesus? It is because she reminds him of his purpose, that God will help him to do what he must now do.

For her, giving her last two cents may mean the end and for him it is the end as well. She gives her resources to a corrupt temple and he is about to give his life for a corrupt world. She withholds nothing from God and neither will he. You see, Jesus really admires her - it takes one to know one.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan