Making Cents of the Kingdom of God
Scripture Reading: Mark 12:38-44
After living in South Korea for seven years, when Sandy and I returned to the U.S. in the summer of 2020, we moved in with my then 85-year-old mother. Having been widowed four years earlier, my mother had to learn to do for herself certain things that my father used to handle. Chief among them was balancing the checkbook. My father was an accountant, so he naturally took care of the finances, but after he died, she made a go of it.
In examining her checkbook, I noticed lots of checks written to charities. None of them were especially large donations—mostly $25 here, $50 there—but to a widow on a fixed income of Social Security and a modest pension, they added up…which is what I did…I added them up. In 2019 alone I found that my mother gave money to more than seventy different charities.
Unsurprisingly, every day her mailbox was full of requests for money, and because of her kind heart, she had a hard time doing what I encouraged her to do, which was to throw them away unopened. It seemed to me that some of these charities preyed upon the elderly, especially widows who live alone. Some of the mailers seemed designed to mislead, claiming that a membership would soon expire or that urgent action of some kind was needed.
The vulnerability of widows is of great concern to Jesus in today’s reading from Mark. He draws the disciples’ attention to one particular poor widow who puts into the temple treasury two small copper coins, which he tells them, is “everything she had, all she had to live on.” Perhaps you’ve heard the widow praised for her radical generosity. I’ve heard that. I’ve thought that myself. The message is that we too ought to be generous givers, and that God can do great things with even our smallest offerings. You can almost see the stewardship letter writing itself.
Preaching a message that says that we should emulate the widow’s generosity is a way of reading the passage that’s prescriptive. A prescriptive reading looks at a passage and asks, What is this telling me to do?
Another way of reading a text is descriptively. In drawing our attention to the widow, what if Jesus isn’t telling us what we ought to do but is simply describing the way things are? How might that affect our understanding? I’m going to invite us to view this passage through a descriptive lens.
“Beware of the scribes,” Jesus warns. They like to make a show of themselves. They like the sense of importance they receive by wearing long, flowing robes. They like to be recognized in public and to be greeted with respect. They like the fact that they sit in the reserved section and that their chairs at banquets are marked “VIP.” As VIPs, they bypass the velvet rope and are escorted to the front of the line.
The portrait of the scribes that Jesus paints for his disciples is almost comical…a caricature. Why, if we were to come across one of these preening peacocks, we’d see through the act in an instant! But Jesus is not warning his disciples solely about the scribes’ hypocrisy. They are not merely disingenuous…they are dangerous. They devour widows’ houses.
Who were the scribes exactly? They appear several times throughout the Gospel of Mark, and usually not in a favorable light. When Jesus preaches his first sermon in his hometown, he is said to preach as one having authority and not as the scribes. Later, the scribes are offended to see that Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners and that he and his disciples don’t wash their hands before eating, breaking with Jewish tradition. Having heard that Jesus casts out demons, they accuse him of having a demon himself.
They are often depicted as being in the company of the Pharisees, chief priests, and elders as yet another group among the religious establishment. But their function was not entirely religious; they could also serve a legal and financial role in society. For example, when a woman’s husband died and there was no son, a scribe would manage her finances for her, women being regarded as unable to do so for themselves. For their stewardship of the estate, scribes would charge a fee, but as you can imagine, this practice was subject to abuse, and the scribes developed a reputation for taking advantage of vulnerable widows.
It’s not only widows’ houses that concern Jesus but also the house of God. This passage, after all, takes place in the temple in Jerusalem, the religious center of Judaism. Mark notes that Jesus takes a seat opposite the treasury and watches the crowd putting money in. Many rich people put in large sums, which I suppose is evident in the clang all those coins must make as they are dropped into the treasury.
But it’s not those coins that interest Jesus. Instead, he draws the disciples’ attention to a poor widow who drops in two small copper coins worth no more than a penny. Plunk. Plunk. Jesus has to call the disciples’ attention to her, because unlike the scribes in their flowing robes, the widow calls no attention to herself. In her society, she is utterly unremarkable. She is poor. She is female. She is a widow. She is for all intents and purposes invisible.
And yet Jesus sees something in her. “Truly I tell you,” he says to his disciples, “this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury.” I like to imagine Jesus pausing there to allow the curiosity and confusion to grow in his disciples, but he doesn’t leave them hanging for long. He continues, “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.”
Mark doesn’t record the disciples’ reactions, but given how they’ve responded to some of his other pronouncements, I think we can make a pretty good guess. Earlier in the Gospel, when Jesus first explained to them that what awaited him in Jerusalem was suffering, rejection, and death, Peter didn’t like the sound of that and rebuked him.
What I believe that Jesus sees in the face of this poor widow…and I do not say this lightly…is the glory of God.
When Jesus asked the disciples what they had been arguing about as they walked together along the road, they were ashamed to tell him that they had been disputing who among them was the greatest. And when Jesus told them how hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God, the disciples looked at each other in bewilderment.
So when Jesus says that a poor widow with two small coins put more into the treasury than all the others who gave demonstrably larger amounts, the disciples are probably thinking, What is he talking about? We saw with our own eyes that she put in just two small coins worth barely a penny.
What I believe that Jesus sees in the face of this poor widow…and I do not say this lightly…is the glory of God. Are you familiar with the name Oscar Romero? He was a Catholic bishop from El Salvador who in the late 1970s became an advocate for the campesinos, the peasant farmers who labored under harsh conditions. In one of his sermons he said, “The glory of God is the living poor person.” To see the glory of God in the face of the poor seems like foolishness to a world that treasures material wealth. It makes no sense to a world in which dollars and cents are the measure of success.
But the kingdom of God calculates value quite differently than the world does. The kingdom of God looks nothing like success as the world understands it. The kingdom of God, as the Apostle Paul writes, is about God choosing what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. It's about God choosing what is weak in the world to shame the strong. It’s about God choosing what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that none of us might boast about our power or prestige, our bank accounts or donation amounts, our education or station in society. The kingdom of God is about Jesus directing our attention to a poor widow rather than a rich young ruler, a generous donor to the temple treasury, or a well educated scribe.
Now let me add one caveat, because I don’t want to be misunderstood. The kingdom of God is not about romanticizing poverty. While Oscar Romero said that “the glory of God is the living poor person,” he also said that “the glory of God is that the poor live.” If the glory of God is that the poor live, then the widow’s offering is ironic. Those two coins that she puts into the treasury, Jesus tells us, are all she has to live on.
Despite our desire to marvel at the widow’s sacrificially generous offering, Jesus never praises her for her generosity. He merely points out that she gave out of her poverty. She gave all that she had. She literally has nothing left to give. So, if we think this is just an inspirational story about giving whatever you can because even a little can go a long way, or if we think this is at all about the widow’s generosity, then we are blind to the injustice of it all.
What do we think becomes of this now penniless widow? Where do we think she goes once she leaves the temple? Does she return home? Does she even have a home to return to, or has her house already been devoured?
If Oscar Romero is right when he says that the glory of God is the face of the poor—and I believe he is—then this poor widow, who gives all that she has, prefigures Jesus Christ. For not long after this moment with the widow in the temple, Jesus will go the way of the cross, giving all that he has for all of us.