Ruth 3: 1-5, 4: 13-17 and Mark 12: 38-44; Widows and Justice; Nov 11, 2018; Pastor Rebecca Ellenson; ICCM
“The Widow’s Mite” is a classic Gospel text that appears in what is usually Stewardship Season back home, the time when congregations ask people for pledges of giving and set the budget for the coming year. Who hasn’t squirmed when a well-meaning pastor asks: “If a poor widow can give her sacrificial bit for the Lord’s work, how can we — so comfortably wealthy by comparison — not give much, much more?”
I’ll admit it; I’ve preached that sermon. And I’ve squirmed, not because the question indicts my giving. I’ve squirmed because this widow’s mite haunts me. Something in me doesn’t want her life exploited for the sake of capital campaigns or annual budgets. I seriously doubt that’s what Jesus had in mind when he commented on her giving. I wish I knew her name. I hope that she died with dignity.
Died? Yes. Died. I suspect that she died, probably mere days after she dropped those two coins into the Temple treasury. Remember what Jesus said about her as she left the Temple that day: “She, out of her poverty, has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”
I think that was an accurate statement. If Jesus said the woman gave everything she had, well, she gave everything she had. We can be sure that she was an impoverished widow in first century Palestine, a woman living on the margins of her society, without a safety net. No husband to advocate for her, no pension to draw from, no social status to hide behind. She was vulnerable in every single way that mattered, just two pennies short of the end.
As Mark presents the timeline, Jesus died about four days after the events in this story. I wonder if the widow died then, too. Here’s what makes me squirm, and what might make you squirm too: what does it mean to applaud a destitute woman who gave her last two cents to the Temple, who then slipped away to starve? Is this really a story of selflessness? Or is it a cautionary tale? Should we cheer or weep?
My question gets complicated further because Mark prefaces the story of the widow with an account of Jesus blasting the religious leaders of his day for their greed, pompousness, and crass exploitation of the poor. “Beware of the scribes,” Jesus tells his followers. “They devour widow’s houses and for the sake of appearance and say long prayers.” The Scribes’ practice of their faith, in other words, is phony, and the religious institution they govern is corrupt — not in any way reflective of the God the Psalmist calls a “Father of orphans and protector of widows.”
In the days leading up to the widow’s last gift, Jesus offers one scathing critique after another of the economic and political exploitation he witnesses all around him. He makes a mockery of Roman pomp and circumstance when he rides into Jerusalem on a donkey’s back. He cleanses the Temple’s money-mongering with a whip.
He refuses to answer the chief priests, scribes, and elders when they demand to know the source of his authority. He confounds religious leaders on taxes, indicts them with a scathing parable about a vineyard and a murdered son, defeats them on the question of resurrection, and bewilders them with riddles about his Davidic ancestry.
Are you longing for a stewardship sermon yet? Jesus doesn’t let us off that easily does he? We can’t buy our way out of his piercing words. No grand offering gesture wins us points. Oh, make no mistake the Blue Church relies on the offerings of this worshipping community to fund its ministry, so give generously and confidently that your contributions will be well managed and spent to further God’s reign in this place. But, that’s all the stewardship talk you’re going to get today.
Jesus isn’t pointing to the widow as a model of giving here… Why on earth would he praise a woman for endangering her already endangered life to support an institution he keeps criticizing? HE DOESN’T! No matter how many stewardship sermons try to make it so, Jesus never commends the widow, applauds her self-sacrifice, or invites us to follow in her footsteps. He simply notices her, and tells his disciples to notice her, too.
OH, I’d give anything to hear Jesus’ tone of voice. Is he heartbroken as he tells his disciples to peel their eyes away from the rich folks and glance in her direction instead? Is he outraged? Is he resigned? What does it mean to him, mere seconds after he’s described the Temple leaders as devourers of widows’ houses, to witness just such a widow being devoured? And worse, to see the leaders participating in her own devouring?
Then to top it all off: immediately after the widow leaves the Temple, Jesus leaves, too, and as he does, an awed disciple invites Jesus to admire the Temple’s mammoth stones and impressive buildings. Jesus’ response is quick and cutting: “Not one of these stones will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”
Ouch! I wonder if the widow is still on Jesus’ mind as he predicts the destruction of the Temple. He has just watched a trusting woman give her all to an institution that refuses to protect the poor. No structure funded by such injustice will stand.
So, back to my earlier question: should we cheer or weep in the face of this story? Or — what about a third alternative — should we call out (as Jesus did) any form of religiosity that manipulates the vulnerable into self-harm and self-destruction? Let’s find the good news.
The gospel is this: Jesus notices the widow. He sees what everyone else is too busy, too grand, too spiritual, and too self-absorbed to see. This might be the only redemptive part of the story — that Jesus’ eyes are always seeing the small, the insignificant, the hidden.
He noticed the widow’s courage. Imagine what courage it took for her to make her gift alongside the rich with their fistfuls of coins, to allow the last scraps of her security to fall out of her palms, to swallow panic, swallow desperation, swallow the entirely human desire to cling to life no matter what — and face her end with hope.
Jesus noticed her dignity. She must have had to steel herself when widowhood in her culture rendered her worthless, “expendable”, even in the Temple she loved. She had to trust — in the face of all the evidence piled up around her — that her tiny gift had value in God’s eyes.
And finally, Jesus noticed her vocation. Whether she knew it or not, her action in the Temple was prophetic. She was a prophet because her personally-costly offering amounted to a holy condemnation of injustice and corruption. Without speaking a word, she spoke God’s Word in the ancient tradition of Isaiah, Elijah, Jeremiah, and other Old Testament prophets.
She was also prophetic in the Messianic sense, because her self-sacrifice prefigured Jesus’ own giving. Perhaps what Jesus noticed was that kinship. Her story mirrored his. The widow gave everything she had to serve a world so broken that it killed her. Days later, Jesus gave everything he had in his unceasing intent to redeem, restore, and renew that same world.
I started preaching about 30 years ago. These two texts for today, about Naomi and Ruth the widows and the Widow’s Mite, have been offered together every three years. So, I guess that means I’ve had 10 or so previous opportunities to feel the full bite of these texts, beyond just squirming over how much to pledge in support of any particular church. I suspect I could hear their message differently this year because of the context we live in. We’ve all been watching the news this year about the flow of men and women and children making the difficult journeys as refugees, desperately seeking a better life.
How can we not make the connection between Ruth and Naomi, destitute, fleeing from Moab to Bethlehem? They were widows without any resources. How can we not see in them the faces of modern-day refugees, making their own difficult journey, traveling, again, nearly empty handed, carrying only the hope of safety and new life.
So, are you longing for a good straightforward stewardship sermon now? Well, so was I, so I dug and dug and dug to find the good news in this text, the gospel. Here it is: God cares about this woman and her sacrifice. Our God sees her plight and recognizes her affliction. Our God will not stand for abuse, especially under the guise of religious piety.
God sees her…and God cares about her. I doubt anyone else, including the religious elite parading around the Temple that day and dropping in their token offerings, noticed this woman. I doubt the disciples following Jesus noticed her either, until their Lord lifted her up for their attention. God also sees our struggles, recognizes our challenges, cares about where we are hard pressed to make ends meet.
And perhaps more importantly, given our relative privilege in this world, God also invites us to see each other, not just those like us, but those we don’t know too. To really see one another – the pain of those who are discriminated against because of their ethnicity, the desolation of those who beg on the street, those who have been exploited by sex traffickers, the millions of refugees seeking safety. God invites us to see them, to care for them, and to advocate for a system that does not leave anyone behind.
Oh, these are squirmy texts for sure…but the bottom line is this: God cares, and God invites us to care, too. God believes that we have something to contribute, that our words and actions can help bring more fully to fruition the kingdom God’s own Son proclaimed and embodied. God cares about the widow and her sacrifice. God will not countenance abuse –especially under the guise of religious piety.
God not only sees all our struggles and cares. God also believes in each one of us enough to use us to make a difference. Where is God already at work? Can we join God’s efforts to see those in distress, help them find comfort and relief, and work for a more just world.