God Gives It All (November 10, 2024)
1 Kings 17:8-16; Psalm 146; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44
Jesus said to his disciples, “This poor widow has put in more than all 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.”
Each of our readings today can be interpreted in at least two very different ways. These alternative interpretations are perhaps easiest to see in our gospel reading. One way to read this text is to hear Jesus praising the widow for her generosity. That’s probably how most of us have typically heard this passage. God loves a cheerful giver, God is pleased when, like this widow, you give until it hurts, and it would behoove you to keep that in mind when the collection plate comes around. We’ve probably all heard that sermon before.
But you could also – and I think more accurately – hear Jesus as expanding upon the criticism of the scribes that he makes at the beginning of this passage. We are now nearing the end of our reading through Mark’s gospel all during this year. Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem and has been teaching in the Temple, and he’s not impressed by what he sees there. Because the Roman Empire, like many empires in history, tended to rule through local elites, who were empowered to fleece ordinary people for the financial benefit of Rome and who got to keep a share of the profits for their troubles. And by the time of Jesus, the Temple was completely and corruptly run by very rich people in cahoots with Rome. So, in the tradition of the prophets like Amos and Isaiah and Jeremiah, Jesus criticizes those who make an outward show of worship while in reality upholding and enforcing an unjust and unfair social order.
As the Psalm today reminds us, God cares for the stranger, God sustains the orphan and the widow, and God frustrates the way of the wicked who do not care for the most vulnerable among us. And so Jesus says, Beware of the scribes who want everyone to see how holy and pious they are, but who in fact devour the savings of widows. And then when Jesus sees this widow putting her last two cents into the Temple treasury, like an elderly person today sending the money they need for their medications to some corrupt televangelist, Jesus is filled with righteous indignation. You see what I’m talking about? You see?
Maybe it’s my own personal experience of seeing people who have used religion to manipulate the vulnerable for their own selfish ends, my own anger at some of what I’ve had the occasion to see up close, my own rage in hearing the stories of people who have been abused in churches, my own shame at not always speaking up as clearly and forcefully as I wished I had when I sensed something was off. Maybe that’s why I resonate so strongly with the interpretation of this story that is not Jesus praising the widow’s generosity so much as Jesus condemning those who take advantage of her in the name of God. But I also don’t think that’s the whole story. I’ll come back to that.
The first reading today is also a story about a poor and generous widow, and it likewise can be interpreted in more than one way. I must confess that I have always had a problem with the way Elijah comes off in this story as such a bro, as the kids say today. It’s such a guy thing to think that this single mother has been put on Earth by God to serve him, to bring him his beer and bake a cake for him, and for him to seem to care only about his own needs and not to even acknowledge her poverty, her anguish, her despair, her worry about her family, her dignity. That’s one way to hear this story, that Elijah is kind of a jerk. And I’ve known people like that – maybe you have too, and it’s all too believable for me to put Elijah in that category.
But there is another way to read this story that appears when we pay a bit more attention to the context. According to the story, there is drought and famine in the land because God is angry that Israel is being unfaithful. The king Ahab has married a princess from the neighboring land of Sidon, in southern Lebanon. Her names was Jezebel, and under Queen Jezebel’s influence, Kin g Ahab promoted worship of the gods of Sidon, and not the Lord, in Israel. And so, the story goes, God sent a drought and famine upon the land, and indeed upon the whole region.
In the depths of this famine, the prophet of God Elijah is sent outside Israel, to a village in Sidon, in the land of Queen Jezebel, to a young widow and her son, who are starving and on the brink of despair. They are not members of the covenant people; they are not responsible for the people of Israel turning away from the Lord, they are collateral damage in the struggle to keep Israel faithful. And Elijah shows up, not with a truckload of humanitarian assistance. He doesn’t come bringing a Thanksgiving basket to share with the less fortunate. (Not that there would be anything wrong with that, if he had; but that’s not the point of the story.)
Instead, Elijah comes to join this young widow and her son in their poverty and their hunger. Where is God in this famine? Has God sent hard times to punish people for their sins? Or is God trying to tell us something by sending Elijah, the most faithful servant of the Lord in all of Israel, to share in the suffering of this Gentile woman and her son? And it turns out that Elijah isn’t just one more mouth that has to be fed when there already isn’t enough. Rather, as the widow extends hospitality to Elijah, even in her want and her despair, in their community together they discover that there is more than enough, that somehow God provides when people in need come together to share the little they have with one another.
And so perhaps we misread the story if we think of Elijah as an arrogant and demanding outsider. Perhaps we should say that Elijah had enough faith to join this starving family in their vulnerability and trust that by sharing their poverty together they would create a space for God to act. Because that’s what happened.
Which brings us to the second reading today, from Hebrews. The letter to the Hebrews is probably the most theologically complex document in the New Testament, especially in its comparison of Jesus in heaven offering his own shed blood with the ritual of the high priest offering sacrifice in the Temple on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The short version is that there are two ways of understanding this letter’s presentation of the sacrifice of Jesus. Some understand this letter to say Jesus is “the best sacrifice,” that Jesus on the cross is doing the same thing the high priest does in the Temple, but with a better, more perfect offering.
Others – and I’m pretty firmly in this camp – read the letter as saying that Jesus is “better than sacrifice,” that the sacrifices of the first covenant were always pointing beyond themselves to an atonement, to a dealing with the brokenness and injustice of this world in a way that ultimately only God can accomplish. And now God has now accomplished this permanent atonement by joining humanity in its vulnerability, particularly in its vulnerability to death, thereby creating a space for us to share our vulnerability with one another and discover the power of God’s presence and abundance and care. That in Jesus God does once and for all what Elijah and the office of the high priest and all the Scriptures have shown us – that God comes among us as the sender of drought and famine to punish, but in weakness to share our vulnerability and so open our eyes to the way God’s power really works in the world.
Which brings us back to the gospel reading today. Is Jesus commending the widow’s generosity, or is he holding her up as a victim of the greed of the Roman sycophants temporarily in charge of the Temple? Without taking anything from the righteous anger Jesus has for the hypocritical scribes, I’ve come around to the view that Jesus perhaps saw in this widow a kindred spirit. Others who were donating to the Temple were perhaps spending some of their disposable income on an eternal life insurance policy, but this poor widow was different. She was willing to make herself vulnerable, she was willing to give her whole livelihood, her whole life. Just as Jesus was about to give his whole life for our sakes. The widow’s gift points towards the gift of Jesus, the gift that God makes of God’s own life.
We gather together this morning in a world suffering from a kind of drought and famine. A world where countless people are fearful and anxious for the future, because humans have not been good stewards of God’s good creation, because humans have failed to love their neighbors, because the institutions that were supposed to protect us and call us to our better selves have been betrayed and are failing us. In this world we gather at the Lord’s table, where he comes among us not to punish but to atone, where he appears in a body broken like bread, in blood poured out like wine. Where he joins us in our vulnerability and invites us to discover the divine presence as we share with each other out of our lack and our anxiety and our need. May he find among us some kindred spirits, who have been given the gift of acting as he does. May we all come to see more clearly how God has given everything for our sake, and is still giving us everything that we need.