NRSMark 12
38As 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, 39and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! 40They devour widows' houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation."
41He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums.42A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny.43Then 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. 44For 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."
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus the Messiah. Amen.
When scholars get around to writing the history of the American church for these past 50 years or so, they will have many themes to explore. Ecumenical relationship will get some attention, since, we all know, there have been great gains in building new and much healthier relationships between churches. We’ve seen the explosion of the charismatic movement and the emergence of the megachurch phenomenon, and that’s bound to be noted. For the past thirty years every election cycle has generated huge comment on the power of what the media calls the religious right, which has already been the subject of much research. Televangelism will probably get a chapter of its own, as will also the struggles of mainline Protestantism to adjust to its now less than mainline status. But I suspect that future church historians will devote considerably more than just a chapter or two to what has come to be known as the clergy sex abuse scandal.
The first widely reported trial of a Catholic priest for sexual abuse of a minor was prosecuted over 30 years ago. According to the 2004 John Jay Report, commissioned and funded by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, over 10,000 people have since come forward to make allegations against over 4,000 priests for incidents from as far back as 1950. There have been multiple criminal prosecutions of priests, and of the 3000+ civil actions filed against the church, as of 2009, U.S. dioceses have paid $2.6B in abuse-related costs, again, according to church documents. There has been deep, broad, and impassioned criticism of bishops, cardinals, and popes for their mishandling of this crisis, and in a landmark case settled just this past June, a jury in Philadelphia found Monsignor William Lynn guilty of conspiracy and endangerment, not for his for his direct abuse of children, but for his role in moving abusive priests to unsuspecting parishes.
Call it a tragedy, call it an outrage, call it sin fueled by pride, privilege, and indifference, but in the long view of history, it’s already clear that the fallout from this scandal is now and will continue to reach far beyond the Catholic Church. Several of you have brought me newspaper and magazine articles on the rise of the so-called “nones,” spelled n-o-n-e-s. These are the people who, when asked to identify their religious preference, check the box marked “none,” as in “none of the above,” as in “thanks, but no thanks,” as in, I fear, “a pox on all your houses.” This is now the fastest growing group of people in the American religious landscape, and there’s no doubt in my mind that a major part of what fuels this trend is disgust over what is often termed “the institutional church.” Among growing numbers of people here in America and around the world, the church is just another blood-sucking, money-grubbing, life-denying institution that they can simply do without. I am not laying this trend all on the clergy sex abuse scandal. There have been horrific, stomach-turning cases of financial, sexual, and criminal abuse in all churches. People can and do argue, rightly I believe, that in the big picture the church is far less prone to corruption that many other secular institutions, but in today’s media environment, the cumulative impact of all these cases, culminating in the clergy sex abuse scandal, is pushing more and more people to lump the whole church in with a host of other self-serving bodies to which they say, “Good riddance.”
My father-in-law Jack Maher, God rest him, was an Irish Catholic from Chicago who, when he got disgusted with something or someone, would screw his face into a pained expression and with his right hand make a kind of waving motion. Sort of like this. You get the picture? Well, that’s what we’re up against. That’s what more and more people are doing when we invite them into the church and ask them to share in our mission and ministry. Am I right? Have you experienced this reaction from among your own family and friends? I wouldn’t doubt it.
A couple of thousand years separate Jesus and my father-in-law, but as I read today’s gospel, I can see Jesus making the same Jack Maher wave-off to the “institutional church” of his day. Like many today, Jesus’ beef was not with the faith of his fathers and mothers, but with the institutional form that faith had taken, namely, the Temple. Now when we think of the Temple we think of a church, or synagogue, or some other house of worship where people go to pray, praise, and give thanks. But by the time of Jesus, the Jerusalem Temple was more like a vast semi-governmental, quasi-political, financially-driven complex with a life all its own. The Temple had its own officers and organization, including a police force, that was more or less autonomous provided that the Temple gave its blessing to the Roman Empire’s rule over Palestine. Because the Temple often ran surpluses, it also functioned sort of like a bank, from which the politically well-placed could withdraw funds to loan out or balance their budgets. Besides the priests and Levites who offered the various scripturally prescribed sacrifices, the Temple also employed legions of scribes, who were doctors of religious law but also clerks who could prepare legal documents and make financial arrangements.
Now there’s an old saying that more people have been robbed with the point of a pen than at the end of a gun. If you apply that saying to a culture where few could read, write, or figure, then you can begin to understand Jesus when in today’s Gospel he says, “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” (Mark 12: 38-40). They are, according to Jesus, like the wolves in sheep’s clothing who “will receive the greater condemnation.”
The irony, certainly not lost on Jesus, is that the Temple was meant to be anything but “a den of robbers.” Throughout Scripture the Temple is extolled as a haven for the widow and a refuge for the orphan. Psalm 84 describes the Temple on Mount Zion as a place of safety, where “even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young” (v. 3). Jesus himself believes the Temple is meant to be a “house of prayer for all peoples,” but instead, the Temple had been corrupted by values alien to God’s kingdom, which brings us the widow in today’s Gospel.
According to Mark, and repeated in Luke, Jesus, while sitting opposite the Temple treasury, points out a poor widow who puts in all she has, two copper coins, equivalent to one of our pennies. Now we all know that the Old Testament calls for Israel to support the Temple with their tithes, but by the time of Jesus, the tithe had become, for all intents and purposes, a tax. It was definitely not a freewill offering decided upon in fasting and prayer. Unlike king and emperor, the Temple did not have its own tax collectors, but if you came to the Temple wanting to offer sacrifice, say, to remove a ritual uncleanness, or more seriously, to receive forgiveness for a sin against the Torah, you had to be paid up. And who kept the books? Right, the scribes! It was, more or less, a pay to pray kind of system. And for a faithful woman like the widow Jesus points out, this meant that she had to pay everything she had in order for her to stay, according to the scribes, right with God.
Spiritually and financially, the widow in today’s Gospel is getting ripped off, but so great is her faithfulness, so deep is her trust in God, that in spite of the corruption of God’s will by sinful men, she persists. She will not be turned away. She will not be put off. She will, in the words of the psalm, “pay [her] vows to the Lord now in the presence of all people, in the courts of the Lord’s house, in the midst of you, O Jerusalem.”
Maybe Jesus is giving us an illustration of sacrificial giving. Maybe Jesus is lifting up an example of how our giving is to be proportionate to our means. But there’s no question that Jesus is teaching us that being God’s people means being on the side of that poor widow. Being God’s people means walking in her shoes, seeing the world from her eyes, and resisting with her everything that would crush, oppose, or hinder God’s will for her and all creation.
The history of the church is long, deep, and wide, filled with chapters glorious and chapters shameful. In our own lifetimes we’ve seen both. But the times when the church has slipped most grievously have been the times when we’ve taken our eyes off the people represented by this poor widow in today’s gospel. When we’ve sought our own security by playing up to the well-placed and pandering to the powerful, we’ve invariably ended up in the ditch, neglecting the “least of these our brothers and sisters,” that is, the very people in whom we are most likely to meet Jesus, like this morning’s poor widow. That neglect can only earn us “the greater condemnation.” But when we stand with her, then Jesus stands with us as well, and with Jesus standing by us, before and behind us, above and below us, not even the gates of hell stand a chance.
In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
