Mark 12:35-44 "Better to Give?" Scott Hoezee

Somebody dropped a collection plate last Sunday morning, and although it clattered and banged a bit, I didn't hear the sound of any coins hitting the deck. I didn't check with our Deacons on this, but my observation of their weekly counting of the collection tells me that they don't typically need many, if any, coin rollers. Certainly you don't see too many copper pennies in the plate as it goes by. If you do, the odds are good that this represented perhaps a child's lovely offering. That's usually the avenue these days by which coins come into this place. A couple of years ago I had the kids save up some money to help out the children of Afghanistan. It took me quite a while the next day to sort and tally the 50 pounds of coins that the kids brought (yes, I did really weigh it).

In the gospels the most famous of all offerings involved two copper coins, said to have been worth even less than a penny. This is the well-known "widow's mite" recorded for us in Mark 12 and again in Luke 21. All my life I have heard this incident touted as being a singular example of generous giving to God and to the church. This widow has become a role model, someone whose attitude the rest of us need to emulate and imitate. Why, if we could all be like this woman, our budget would be met with ease! We'd have more money than we need and so could begin even more ministry programs.

That is the pop interpretation of this incident. Hence, we imagine that when Jesus spoke what he did in verses 43-44, the tone of his voice was appreciative, maybe wondrous. Perhaps Jesus was even shaking his head in amazement as he pointed out to the disciples how very much this woman had given. Although he didn't say it, you could almost tack on the phrase "Go and do likewise" as the conclusion of this story.

This past week, however, I came to realize that this angle on this story may very well be all wrong. But please don't misunderstand: even though I am about to suggest a revision of how this story should be interpreted, even so this will take nothing away from the widow herself. We can safely assume that her heart was in the right place. She did give generously and out of genuine reverence and piety for God at that.

So in one sense we could look at this woman and see in her an example of setting the right kingdom priorities. Last month we pondered stewardship in depth one morning, and as the Deacons need to remind us from now until December 31, for Calvin Church to stay afloat and solvent, we do need to give generously to God's church. Some of us perhaps need to be reminded to look at the ledger of our checkbooks to see how much we've given so far this year and then honestly ask ourselves if that number comes anywhere close to representing the kind of income percentage we could and should give.

In other words, the typical way we assess this widow and her giving is not all wrong, but it is still incomplete at best. Her heart may have been in the right place, but from the looks of Mark 12 her piety was not only a good thing, it had also become the exploitable target for some very unscrupulous religious leaders at that time. Given what Jesus had said in verses 35-40, I can no longer imagine that his voice was full of appreciative wonder at the end of this chapter. In fact, I now detect in the voice of our Lord a hint of scorn, of criticism, of astonishment that the situation was what it was.

This is one of many passages where the larger context has tended to drop away over the years but where the context is absolutely vital if we are to hear Jesus correctly. Because after all, this entire section of Mark's gospel is harshly critical of the temple establishment. In the first verses we read earlier, Jesus attacks the very theology of the scribes. Their view of the Messiah, the Christ, was woefully inadequate. They prattled on and on about how the Christ would be David's son, thus losing sight of the fact that the true Christ would be not just a distant relative of David but David's Lord, David's God. The scribes had played into the popular idea that one day a great-great-great grandson of David would show up and would lead a popular uprising and revolt against Rome. He'd be a human figure but a powerful one who would fulfill the people's every political aspiration.

But by reminding the crowds of the divine dimension of the true Christ, Jesus was hinting hugely that things might turn out different than the scribes thought. After all, once the Son of God, and not just the Son of David, came down to earth, there would be no predicting how things might go. God, after all, tends always to surprise us. His ways are not our ways. In fact, God might just turn the whole world upside-down and do a shockingly new thing. Of course, keep in mind that Jesus spoke these words less than 5 days prior to his own death on a cross. Talk about divine surprises! Nobody back then wanted a dead son of David hanging off a giant spit of wood. If the Christ were no more than David's human relative, crucifixion would spell the end of his usefulness. A dead Christ would be no Christ and so you could, literally, cross out his name from the list of messianic candidates. But Jesus says that's wrong. No one should pretend to have the identity of the Christ cased.

To the delight of the crowds, Jesus out-exegeted the supposed experts in the Scriptures. He attacked nothing less than their very theology. But he's not finished yet. Next Jesus goes after their spirituality. In startlingly blunt terms, Jesus as much as calls the scribes hypocrites, charlatans, fakes, and pious pretenders. These are chilling words for any of us to hear but they have special bite for those of us in this room wearing a flowing clergy robe! Doing the right things just for show, using clergy garb as a coverup for an insincere heart is indeed the worst form of clergy abuse. Hypocrisy galls most everyone, but hypocritical pastors irk us more than anything.

Those of you familiar with Dante's The Inferno will recall the hellish punishment Dante imagined would come to hypocrites: for all eternity they would wear the most gorgeous of flowing robes, looking ever-so-lovely on the outside. But those robes would be lined with lead, making the very act of standing up straight an abiding agony. Such would indeed be a fit punishment for those who spent their lives harboring ugliness and selfishness on the inside even as they exuded nothing but superior piety on the outside.

So Jesus pegs these clergy as vain, pompous, proud, arrogant. All of that is bad enough but the kicker--and obviously the key that unlocks the reason why we need a revamped view of the widow's mite--is when Jesus says that the scribes devour the homes of the widowed. Unhappily, we have no clear idea what that meant. One commentary I consulted last week listed no less than six possible scenarios that could explain just how the scribes devoured the estates of widows. But because Jesus immediately mentions also their reciting of long prayers it may be that the scribes were essentially selling ministry.

If any of you comes up to Pastor Bob or me after the service today to request prayer for this or that, I can guarantee we will say that we will pray for you. Pastor Bob may even put it on the telephone prayer line tomorrow if that is OK with you. We are happy to pray for one another. But suppose you asked this of Pastor Bob only to hear him say, "Sure, I'll put that on the prayer line. But I might forget. Maybe if you wrote a generous check to the Ministry Fund, that will help jog my memory tomorrow when I update the line." That would be dreadful! But alas, it also appears to have been what was going on in Jesus' day.

Maybe it was not quite that crass, but clearly the religious leaders were doing something that was making the already-vulnerable widow population feel obligated to give to the temple more than they frankly could afford. That's why when Jesus then sees a widow giving away the last two coins she had to rub together, he sees in that not first of all an example of good stewardship in action (and so something that we should all try to imitate). What Jesus saw was a glaring example of how far off the beam the whole temple enterprise had gotten. This woman felt obligated to give away what little she had and although that revealed how earnest she was, it was an earnestness that had been manipulated. So when Jesus says, "That's all she had to live on," he said it with exasperation in his voice. She should not have done that. She should not have been told to do that.

As Andre Resner points out in a commentary on this passage, Jesus' closing words here were essentially a lament. As Jesus watched this widow walk away with now literally nothing to live on, he as much as said, "There goes another precious one down the tubes!" Small wonder that at the beginning of Mark 13, as the disciples, in good tourist fashion, call attention to the magnificence of the temple building itself, Jesus sneers that one day soon, the whole place would be sacked. Not one stone would be left cemented to another one, and given what he had just seen, you get the feeling that Jesus believed that destruction of the temple would be only just. They were building the thing by ill-gotten gain.

Having pondered all this last week, I conclude that although different from what I thought before, this is probably the right way to view this passage. The problem is that this story is a whole lot easier to apply if we turn it into an example of good stewardship! My new interpretation does not lend itself to any easy application. So what can we carry away from Mark 12 this morning? Well, we could focus on the sinful tragedy of a corrupt church or religious organization. It would not be difficult, for instance, to point to the recent scandals in the Catholic Church, noting what happens when layers of deception, denial, and corruption become institutionalized. And indeed, bishops who dealt with predatory priests by doing little more than moving them around represents its own kind of spiritual "devouring" of the vulnerable. We rightly lament it when this happens in the church.

But if we zeroed in on the Catholics, that might be too easy, highlighting the failures of others and so maybe ignoring our own problems. Rather than that, let's see if we can get a bit more practical for our own daily lives. Maybe if we focus on a more subtle aspect of this passage, we can discover that kind of practical application.

Because in a way you could take this entire passage as asking in an extended way the question, "Who gives what in the church and for what purpose?" We noted earlier that the material here surrounding all that son of David stuff was Jesus' way of hinting that when you are dealing with no less than God's own Christ, you should be prepared to have your world turned upside-down. Jesus himself was at that time teetering on the brink of doing the very shocking, seemingly unChrist-like thing of sacrificing himself on a cross. Jesus would give up himself to save us. He would give away all that he had, right down to his very life's blood. It would look like the end, but it was really the beginning. It would look like only death but it would really lead to abundant life.

In a sense, therefore, we have hints in this passage of two kinds of self-giving: there is Jesus giving it all away and this widow giving it all away. But the widow would not have been exploited into giving up her very life if the clergy of her day had any clue as to the true nature of the true Christ's ministry. That is to say, if they could have caught a vision of God's Christ--if they had paid attention to the ministry of Jesus up to even that point--then they, too, would have been focused on a compassionate caring for all people. A Christ-like attitude would have made them realize that true ministry involves insisting that this woman not give a blessed penny to the temple in favor of their reaching out to her.

It wasn't just the money that was flowing in the wrong direction here it was the whole focus of life. Our goal as followers of God and disciples of Jesus is to become dispensers of life: life-givers and life-sharers. So in the church this may mean that some of us give generously and others of us receive. Sometimes we need to tell people not to give because if they did, they would be sapping their own lives of needed resources. But the point is that within the community of faith, we should constantly be looking for ways to help each other flourish. We should almost be tripping over one another in the rush to serve, to watch out for the vulnerable and suffering among us, to do what we can to build one another up as the one Body of Christ that we are.

We tend to view the story of the widow's mite as a reminder that we all need to give until it hurts. But as it turns out, this story may actually be a goad for us to care until there is joy for all--we don't all have to give until it hurts but instead we serve until the hurts of life are ministered to. That's the tone that was set long ago by the one who was not just David's son but God's own Son who surprised the world by revealing compassion and sacrifice as the path that leads not just to salvation but to a whole new form of humanity. In terms of money, for many of us one vital way to express our care for this congregation is through giving generously out of the abundance with which God has blessed us. Others of us can't do that so much but we can give in other ways.

In fact, sometimes one of the things we can "give" to Calvin Church is our willingness to receive help when we need it. We Reformed types aren't always adept at that, however. To become the target of ministry means that you must be somewhat weak, maybe vulnerable. And we don't always like admitting to our weaknesses and needs. We'd rather give compassion than receive it. So we minimize our pain by saying things like, "Yes, there are things in my life that are not great but hey, compared to lots of other people in this church, or compared to the hungry people in Africa, or compared to so-and-so's family, I'm really just fine." We Reformed Calvinist types are great at comparing ourselves to people more miserable than we are as a way to deny our own need to be ministered unto.

But for this to be a truly life-giving, life-sharing community of Jesus Christ, we need to see that there are lots of ways of participating in ministry, including those seasons in all of our lives when we frankly can't give but we can receive what others give to us. After all, the situation that earned Jesus' ire at the very end of Mark 12 was the result of a widow being told that for her, ministry went only one direction: the direction of her giving. "It's more blessed to give than to receive" the scribes perhaps told her. But we tell that to ourselves as well. But short of anyone's becoming a complete sponge who exploits the church's goodwill, the notion that it is always better to give than receive doesn't work for ministry in a church. In order for any of us to give, others of us must receive. And it is very blessed to receive as well as to give.

Yes, the fact that Jesus gave his all for us in self-forgetful sacrifice sets a tone of service we all must adopt. We live for others and give ourselves up for others in imitation of the Lord we follow. But what we forget is that none of us can do that unless somebody, somewhere is willing to receive. And what we also forget is that we ourselves would never have received resurrection life had we not, at some past point, admitted our own deadness in sin, our own weakness, vulnerability, and so need to receive what only the Christ can give. After all, as Jesus watched that widow give away her life, had someone said to him, "Well, it is more blessed to give than to receive," I suspect Jesus would have replied, "Then how will you ever be able to receive what I am about to give to the world?" If we are never weak enough to be willing to receive, then how can Jesus get into our hearts? Amen.