By the Rev’d Andrew Coyle

Season: 32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time

Readings: Ruth 3:1-5; 4: 13-17 | Heb 9:24-28 | Mark 12:38-44

So, I don’t know about you, but I’ve got questions about our gospel reading this morning!

Jesus is sitting with his disciples in one of the courtyards of the temple in Jerusalem watching people put money into the temple treasury.

He sees a poor widow putting two copper coins into the treasury, and he says to his disciples, “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.”

Now, one of the questions I have is, Is Jesus actually commending this woman’s behaviour? Because that’s how this story often comes off, right?

Other people have put in large sums of money, but those large sums come from even greater wealth, so the givers are not being beggared by their giving.

The widow, on the other hand, as Jesus observes, gives everything she has. She is “all in”.

So, it might be that Jesus is using this woman’s act of giving as an object lesson that we too should be “all in” in our response to God.

And there would be some scriptural support for this understanding.

Afterall, when Jesus is asked “what is the greatest commandment?”, he responds by saying, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength”. He also responds to a rich young man who asks him what he must do to inherit eternal life by telling him that he must sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor. And both of those responses seem to imply that Jesus is inviting us to be “all in” in our response to God, to put everything we have at the service of God.

And, yes, I think that Jesus is undoubtedly making that invitation.

But here’s my other question.

Nowhere in scripture, not in the Law or the Prophets, and certainly not in the words of Jesus, does it say that those who are already poor should have their lives made even less tenable by being required to give their last two cents to the church or to anyone else.

In fact, the Law and the Prophets and the words of Jesus actually give us entirely the opposite impression – that it is, in fact, the responsibility of the whole community to care for those who are poor, not grind them further into the dust.

Indeed, those words of Jesus to that rich young man that I just quoted are entirely to the point here. Jesus tells that rich young man to sell all his possessions and give the money to who? To the poor, right?

Our entire scriptural tradition is very clear that a dimension of our love for God is love for our neighbour, most particularly the widow, the orphan, the refugee, the stranger among us, those whose lives and existence are marginal and tenuous.

These are the people to whom we need to pay particular attention, and our attention to them is not just about supporting them enough that they can continue to keep their heads above water, it is actually about reordering our society and our common life so that everyone is able to participate fully in that common life without having to worry about basic survival.

And, to return to our text, this is what I think Jesus is inviting us to consider and to give our lives to. We are being encouraged to pursue the common good.

One of the challenges that we face with reading scripture in relatively small chunks as we do each Sunday morning, is that we can tend to focus on a text in a way that isolates it from its place in the larger narrative context.

And I think today’s Gospel reading is a case in point.

This passage is actually part of a larger narrative in which Jesus’ observation about the widow is part of a larger critique of the whole social system in which this widow is located and which demands that this woman beggars herself to make her temple offering.

If we go back to the beginning of chapter 11, we find that the day after Jesus first arrives in Jerusalem for what will be his final days, he goes into the temple and has a look around before retiring to the village of Bethany for the night. And I think there is quite a lot of anticipation loaded into that brief visit.

It’s a bit like he’s casing the joint in preparation for what comes next. Because what comes next is on the very next day Jesus enters the temple and overturns the tables and drives out those who are buying and selling and changing money.

A little later in the narrative, he tells the Parable of Wicked Tenants and the chief priests and the scribes and elders are under no illusion that Jesus is telling this parable against them.

Then he engages in some verbal sparring with various scribes, Pharisees and Herodians who are all attempting to trap and discredit him by catching him out on a point of law: there’s the question about paying taxes, the question about the resurrection, and the question about the greatest commandment.

And, actually, when Jesus is asked that last question, the scribe who first put the question to him responds approvingly to Jesus’ answer and says that loving God and loving your neighbour is “much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices”.

So in all of this, what we have is a sustained critique of the whole temple apparatus, a critique that includes today’s passage where Jesus denounces the scribes as a bunch of self-serving hypocrites who “devour widows’ houses”.

So today’s passage is less about “Look at that widow. Isn’t she a great example of sacrificial giving!” and more about “look at this whole corrupt system, of self-seeking power and exploitation that requires that poor people become poorer to serve the needs of the system!”

Jesus is condemning the political-religious establishment as a den of thieves and crooks. And, indeed, in the verses that follow today’s passage, Jesus foretells the destruction of the whole temple precinct: “Do you see these buildings?”, he asks. “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down”.

Now, some people are troubled by the image of Jesus as a revolutionary or political activist. Many of us have grown up with the understanding that our faith and our politics are things to be kept separate from each other. But when Jesus tells his listeners to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength and to love your neighbour as yourself, he is inviting us to bring those things that we may formerly have kept separate back together into one integrated whole, so that our faith is all of a piece with our political activity, with the way we spend our money, with the way we consume the earth’s resources and treat the other creatures of the earth, with the way we treat one another, most especially the way we treat those whose existence is marginalised and tenuous.

Jesus is inviting us to see the world through the eyes of faith, through the eyes of love, through the eyes of hope, so that when we see the widow putting her last coins in the temple treasury, the questions we ask are: What’s wrong with this picture? What is broken in our society and in our world that has put this widow in this situation? How are we being invited to respond to this situation?