Mark 12:38-44
November 11, 2018
First Presbyterian Church, Sterling IL
Christina Berry
We are continuing in the gospel of Mark for one more week in our stewardship season. You may remember that by this point in Mark’s gospel, Jesus has been in Jerusalem for a few days of this last week of his life. On the way in to town, he stopped and healed a blind beggar, and last week, he conversed with a scribe, and the two of them agreed that the greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. It’s helpful to remember, as we hear this text, that Jesus does not condemn EVERY scribe or Pharisee- the scribe in last week’s story was a kindred spirit to him. In this episode, we see Jesus at the temple.
The temple in Jerusalem is a major character in this section of the gospel, even when it is not mentioned. In this last week of Jesus’ life, he keeps circling back to the temple. It has been the center of Jewish life – the physical symbol of all that it means to be faithful. Where once the temple was the center of faithful practice, now Jesus is at the center: One way to think of this is that Jesus has come to create a new perspective on religious life. Where once the focus was on a PLACE, now the focus is on a PERSON. A reminder is in order, though, that God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ does not supersede or replace God’s covenant with the Jews. That covenant is as everlasting as God’s love and faithfulness. Let’s listen for God’s word to us as Jesus teaches in the temple in Mark 12:38-44.
As he taught, he said,
"Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows' houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation."
He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them,
"Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those 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."
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
A few years ago, the editor of Presbyterians Today asked me to write some articles for the magazine that would help parents explain Christian stewardship to their children. I started it with this story:
A long time ago, a very funny guy named Jack Benny had a radio show. Jack Benny was very stingy, and never wanted to spend even a penny. On the show, a robber came up to Jack and said: “Your money or your life.”
Then there was a long, long, silence,
The robber said, “Look bud. I said, your money or your life.”
And Jack Benny said, “I'm thinking it over!”[1]
When my article got to the editor she cut that part. She suggested, rightly, that Jack Benny and a radio show might be outside the experience of a lot of younger readers! Some of us might remember Jack Benny, though, and many of us remember someone like him. Many of us learned our ideas about money and life and giving from someone who was shaped by the Depression of the 1930s. Some of us learned to hold onto every scrap of paper and string, every spoonful of food, and every penny of income. We had to be careful, for fear that something terrible would happen. This resulted in some very thrifty people accumulating some significant wealth. It also resulted in some full attics and basements and cupboards, accumulating stacks of Styrofoam meat trays, old newspapers, paper grocery sacks, fabric remnants, and shoe boxes.
Who taught you about money and life?
Most of us learn about money and personal finance from our parents.
Thanks be to God.
A few years ago, the editor of Presbyterians Today asked me to write some articles for the magazine that would help parents explain Christian stewardship to their children. I started it with this story:
A long time ago, a very funny guy named Jack Benny had a radio show. Jack Benny was very stingy, and never wanted to spend even a penny. On the show, a robber came up to Jack and said: “Your money or your life.”
Then there was a long, long, silence,
The robber said, “Look bud. I said, your money or your life.”
And Jack Benny said, “I'm thinking it over!”[1]
When my article got to the editor she cut that part. She suggested, rightly, that Jack Benny and a radio show might be outside the experience of a lot of younger readers! Some of us might remember Jack Benny, though, and many of us remember someone like him. Many of us learned our ideas about money and life and giving from someone who was shaped by the Depression of the 1930s. Some of us learned to hold onto every scrap of paper and string, every spoonful of food, and every penny of income. We had to be careful, for fear that something terrible would happen. This resulted in some very thrifty people accumulating some significant wealth. It also resulted in some full attics and basements and cupboards, accumulating stacks of Styrofoam meat trays, old newspapers, paper grocery sacks, fabric remnants, and shoe boxes.
Who taught you about money and life?
Most of us learn about money and personal finance from our parents.
If we’re lucky, somewhere down the line we learn about balance:
saving and spending,
giving and keeping,
borrowing and lending.
If we’re really lucky, we learn about generosity and gratitude. Jesus’ teaching in this passage concerns two main areas: wealth and poverty, and generosity and greed. He has warned about the scribes who put their righteousness on display, who take delight in having other people honor them, who like to deliver long windy pompous prayers. We’re not sure exactly what it is to “devour widows houses,” but we are sure that the scriptures teach us, as the Rabbis say, that “to rob widows and orphans is to rob God.”[2]
After Jesus warns his disciples – that’s us, too, by the way – he observes the faithful coming with their money as an offering to the temple treasury. There are many rich donors, putting in large sums. Then a widow steps up and drops in two tiny copper coins. They are each worth about 1/64th of a denarius. You’ll recall that a denarius was enough for a day laborer to buy his daily bread – to live one more day. With one denarius as a day’s pay, the laborer could eat. That day. There was nothing left to save or share or spend.
If we think of a denarius as being worth roughly $50 in modern terms, the widow put in about one dollar and fifty-six cents. That is a small amount to most of us, but it was all that she had. Widows had so little that they were exempt from temple giving. But this widow brought her two tiny coins, her gift.
It’s a remarkable act of generosity, and it’s a tragic expression of reality.
She is giving all she has, AND she is in abject poverty.
She didn’t just give proportionally; she gave sacrificially.
She gave everything.
All of it.
This is counter cultural, particularly in the United States of America. Our culture tells us that we should be concerned with what we have, and what we can get and how we can hang onto it. That kind of thinking contributes to the sad reality in our country that when wealth goes up, giving goes down. Think about that: as wealth goes up, giving goes down. The concern of the average person is focused on what I have, not on what you need.
Politicians who are trying to get elected ask “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” That question narrows the frame of good governance to what is good for you, rather than what is good for all.
In the economy of the church, the question is not,
“Are YOU better off now than before,”
saving and spending,
giving and keeping,
borrowing and lending.
If we’re really lucky, we learn about generosity and gratitude. Jesus’ teaching in this passage concerns two main areas: wealth and poverty, and generosity and greed. He has warned about the scribes who put their righteousness on display, who take delight in having other people honor them, who like to deliver long windy pompous prayers. We’re not sure exactly what it is to “devour widows houses,” but we are sure that the scriptures teach us, as the Rabbis say, that “to rob widows and orphans is to rob God.”[2]
After Jesus warns his disciples – that’s us, too, by the way – he observes the faithful coming with their money as an offering to the temple treasury. There are many rich donors, putting in large sums. Then a widow steps up and drops in two tiny copper coins. They are each worth about 1/64th of a denarius. You’ll recall that a denarius was enough for a day laborer to buy his daily bread – to live one more day. With one denarius as a day’s pay, the laborer could eat. That day. There was nothing left to save or share or spend.
If we think of a denarius as being worth roughly $50 in modern terms, the widow put in about one dollar and fifty-six cents. That is a small amount to most of us, but it was all that she had. Widows had so little that they were exempt from temple giving. But this widow brought her two tiny coins, her gift.
It’s a remarkable act of generosity, and it’s a tragic expression of reality.
She is giving all she has, AND she is in abject poverty.
She didn’t just give proportionally; she gave sacrificially.
She gave everything.
All of it.
This is counter cultural, particularly in the United States of America. Our culture tells us that we should be concerned with what we have, and what we can get and how we can hang onto it. That kind of thinking contributes to the sad reality in our country that when wealth goes up, giving goes down. Think about that: as wealth goes up, giving goes down. The concern of the average person is focused on what I have, not on what you need.
Politicians who are trying to get elected ask “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” That question narrows the frame of good governance to what is good for you, rather than what is good for all.
In the economy of the church, the question is not,
“Are YOU better off now than before,”
but “are OTHERS better off now?”
Jesus, in his commentary, exposes the greed of some and the generosity of the widow and others like her. And no one in the whole gospel of Mark receives a higher commendation than this widow. Jesus observes and comments:
"Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those 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."
To go back to the Jack Benny story, she put in her money AND her life!
That’s really what stewardship is all about – not just giving a portion of our time, talents, and money, but giving our whole lives to God, in gratitude for the life God has given us in Jesus Christ. That’s something we learn by example and experience. In my life, the witness to generosity was my parents. My father believed in tithing. And I mean tithing in the precise meaning of that word: he and my mother gave the church ten percent of all their income.
But that was just a starting point. Their giving went well beyond a tithe. They gave to other Christian organizations, and they gave financial help to individual people, without regard to tax deductions or whether the people were deserving. They gave to their church regularly (and Mom still does) even when they weren’t entirely happy with all of the decisions of the leadership. They understood that their giving was not based on their satisfaction, or their own needs getting met, or even on the direction taken by the congregation. Their giving was not based on the church’s need of the money, but upon their need, as disciples of Jesus, to give generously. They generously gave not only money, but their very lives – in service to the gospel.
Their example is one to which I aspire – the very embodiment of loving God with heart, soul, mind and strength; and loving neighbor with that same intensity. Jesus once described the greatest love as that kind of love that would prompt a person to give up their own life for a friend. There’s no greater love than that. That’s the kind of love Jesus has for us – love so deep, so broad, so wide, so high that we cannot even imagine it.
So, then, who showed you, through their actions,
what it means to give to God out of their sense of gratitude?
Who taught you to be generous?
Who was a witness to generosity in your life,
giving their all to further the kingdom of God?
As you think about the saints in your life, those whose faces you see in the great cloud of witnesses, you may not be able to immediately identify someone who is an example of giving generously out of deep gratitude. But there is one face that we can all see and one whom we know. As we consider our own commitments, we can keep our eyes fixed on him, “looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.”
God in Jesus Christ is the true witness to generosity.
God is able to do far beyond all that we could ask or imagine
by his power at work within us;
glory to him in the church and in Christ Jesus
for all generations, forever and always.
Jesus, in his commentary, exposes the greed of some and the generosity of the widow and others like her. And no one in the whole gospel of Mark receives a higher commendation than this widow. Jesus observes and comments:
"Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those 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."
To go back to the Jack Benny story, she put in her money AND her life!
That’s really what stewardship is all about – not just giving a portion of our time, talents, and money, but giving our whole lives to God, in gratitude for the life God has given us in Jesus Christ. That’s something we learn by example and experience. In my life, the witness to generosity was my parents. My father believed in tithing. And I mean tithing in the precise meaning of that word: he and my mother gave the church ten percent of all their income.
But that was just a starting point. Their giving went well beyond a tithe. They gave to other Christian organizations, and they gave financial help to individual people, without regard to tax deductions or whether the people were deserving. They gave to their church regularly (and Mom still does) even when they weren’t entirely happy with all of the decisions of the leadership. They understood that their giving was not based on their satisfaction, or their own needs getting met, or even on the direction taken by the congregation. Their giving was not based on the church’s need of the money, but upon their need, as disciples of Jesus, to give generously. They generously gave not only money, but their very lives – in service to the gospel.
Their example is one to which I aspire – the very embodiment of loving God with heart, soul, mind and strength; and loving neighbor with that same intensity. Jesus once described the greatest love as that kind of love that would prompt a person to give up their own life for a friend. There’s no greater love than that. That’s the kind of love Jesus has for us – love so deep, so broad, so wide, so high that we cannot even imagine it.
So, then, who showed you, through their actions,
what it means to give to God out of their sense of gratitude?
Who taught you to be generous?
Who was a witness to generosity in your life,
giving their all to further the kingdom of God?
As you think about the saints in your life, those whose faces you see in the great cloud of witnesses, you may not be able to immediately identify someone who is an example of giving generously out of deep gratitude. But there is one face that we can all see and one whom we know. As we consider our own commitments, we can keep our eyes fixed on him, “looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.”
God in Jesus Christ is the true witness to generosity.
God is able to do far beyond all that we could ask or imagine
by his power at work within us;
glory to him in the church and in Christ Jesus
for all generations, forever and always.
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