This gospel about the poor widow who gives everything she has to the temple has probably been the most popular scripture for fund-raising in the history of church fund-raising, no matter what denomination you’re a part of. After all, how could you not use a gospel where the message seems to be, even if you think you don’t have a lot to give, dig down, and make a real sacrifice with what you have. And it’s paired with yet another reading from the Old Testament, about yet another widow, who serves the prophet Elijah with her last scrap of flour and oil.
The question of how much to give away, and about our priorities, is all throughout this gospel of Mark. You might remember the rich young man just a couple of weeks ago who wanted to know what to do to gain eternal life, and when Jesus told him to take a risk and give away everything, he just couldn’t, and walked away. Today in his place we have this poor woman with no rights and no property and also nothing to lose who goes ahead and does what the rich man can’t: risk everything. So yes, this is a reading that is meant to point out a contrast, between the rich who might give away some of what’s left over, and the poor, who have nothing left over, but give anyway.
But I think there’s more here today in this gospel even than that. I’m sure you’ve seen those problems that they sometimes put on intelligence tests or another kind of puzzle book, where the task is to look at a drawing and find all the little things that are wrong — it’s a scene that looks normal, but if you look closely you’re supposed to notice that there’s a beach ball in the dining room, or maybe the person who looks normal but if you look, actually has two left hands? And today the what’s-wrong-with-this-picture question is about this whole system that we’re watching here about people giving money to the temple.
We all know that widows are constantly pointed out to us, in the Old Testament and the New, as the perfect examples of people with no power and no rights. They are the people we should use as a measure of how just a society we are actually running. Again and again, people are warned by the prophets when they cross a line and start neglecting those who have so little. And now here’s a wealthy temple, overseen by scribes who live off the donations, and a widow who gives everything she has. There’s just something very wrong with this picture. It’s hard not to think that the temple should be giving her money, not the other way around. It’s one of the reasons that Jesus predicted that this temple was going to be gone in just a few years, one of the reasons after this scene in the gospel he lost his temper and turned over the tables of the money-changers. The temple and the treasury looked beautiful and wealthy, but it actually was very broken, and in fact, it was doomed. It was a system that worked well for a few, but not so much for the very people it was supposed to work for.
Many scribes come in for some of Jesus’ most piercing remarks. Today he says that they devour the houses of widows, which is pretty tough. What really happened was that their status and the system they were a part of had become more important to them than actually living out the scriptures they were so devoted to. They might be generous at times, since they can afford to be, but they long ago stopped noticing what was really happening on their watch. And yet Jesus notices what is happening, he sees that in the very place where the poor should be treated best they are treated as a source of income for the wealthy.
Today this gospel is trying to get under our skin, not only about being as generous as the widow, but to see what’s wrong in the pictures that we take for granted, the things we think are working the way they should but actually aren’t, to see the discrepancies between how we say the vulnerable should be treated and what actually happens. We all know there are plenty of systems that are broken out there just the way the temple was. We know about all the things that prevent the poor from getting and keeping even a low-paying job, we know about the forces that put so many people in prison for so long, and that keep them from getting real lives back once they get out. Today we’re reminded that those are the people whose side we’re supposed to be on, they are the people who give us our report card on how we’re actually doing, as individuals and as a church. If the world we’re a part of isn’t working for them, then it’s time for us to notice, and to do what we can to get priorities back where they should be.
It sounds like hard work, all this generosity, all this willingness to change the rules by which the world works to help those who need us. And yet in a way, what Jesus is promising us here with all this talk about giving is freedom. The widows today give away everything they have, the last bit of flour, the last two coins, and they do it they have confidence that God will not let them fall. They weren’t leaping into nothing. Jesus wants us to know if we think we’re going to fall, that it’s only because like most people, we simply don’t see the net, ready to hold onto us no matter what we give away.