1 Kings 17:8-16
8 Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, 9 “Go now to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and live there, for I have commanded a widow there to feed you.” 10 So he set out and went to Zarephath. When he came to the gate of the town, a widow was there gathering sticks; he called to her and said, “Bring me a little water in a vessel, so that I may drink.” 11 As she was going to bring it, he called to her and said, “Bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.” 12 But she said, “As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it and die.” 13 Elijah said to her, “Do not be afraid; go and do as you have said, but first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterward make something for yourself and your son. 14 For thus says the Lord the God of Israel: The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.” 15 She went and did as Elijah said, so that she as well as he and her household ate for many days. 16 The jar of meal was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord that he spoke by Elijah.
Mark 12:38-44
38 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 39 and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! 40 They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”
41 He sat down opposite the treasury and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. 42 A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. 43 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. 44 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.”
Perhaps you noticed that all three passages today focus on widows, but the 1 Kings passage begins with the prophet Elijah. At the start of chapter 17 he goes to a foreign king, Ahab, and declares that there will be a drought in the land for as long as the Lord determines. Elijah himself is also affected by this drought, so the Lord commands him to go drink from a particular stream and advises him that the ravens will feed him. And indeed, every day, in both the morning and the evening, birds brought him bread and meat. But “after a while” the stream dried up, so God told Elijah to go to a widow in Zarephath who has been appointed to provide for him.
Elijah does as the Lord commands, and encounters the widow - who is not named - near the city gate as she’s gathering sticks. He then asks her to bring him a a drink of water, and as she’s complying, he then asks her to bring some bread as well. She replies that she only has a tiny bit of flour and oil and that she’s now gathering sticks in order to prepare their final meal before they die. She’s past despair, resigned to her fate. Elijah responds that she should first bring him some food anyway, then he prophecies that the flour and oil will not run out as long as the drought persists. And so it was; through this little miracle the Lord provided for Elijah and the widow and her son.
The story seems to have a clear moral: if you trust in the Lord, the Lord will provide. Elijah faithfully proclaimed the Lord’s words and faithfully followed his commands, and the Lord provided. The widow trusted the words of the prophet, and the Lord provided. She was willing to give what little she had and received a relative abundance in return.
The passage from Mark seems to tell a similar story about another widow who gave what little she had and threw herself on God’s mercy. But her story is a bit more complicated. The passage begins with Jesus warning his audience about the scribes even though, as we saw last week, he’s just had a quite positive interaction with a scribe. That guy must’ve been the exception that proves the rule, because Jesus aims harsh criticism at the scribes as a group. He describes them as the sort who like to dress up in their fancy clothes and enjoy the perks of being dignitaries. They say long prayers just to impress people, in direct opposition to Jesus’ warning not “heap up empty phrases” thinking you will be “heard because of their many words.” These are people who use their position to elevate themselves, whose worship of God is a means to some other end, not an end in itself. They are the worst kind of people: hypocrites. And there’s one more charge Jesus brings against them: “they devour widows’ houses”.
These words should still be in our hears when Jesus turns his attention to a widow depositing two coins into the temple treasury. He contrasts her gift with those of the rich folks who came before. Although they had given much more in absolute terms, in relative terms her gift was far more substantial, for they gave out of their abundance but she out of her poverty.
We tend to assume that Jesus is lifting up this woman as an exemplar of generosity, that we too should be willing to give a lot even if we have a little, that even an apparently trivial gift is valuable in the eyes of the Lord. All these things may be true, but Jesus, I think, is much more ambivalent about what he sees. He sees a woman who gives, not merely as an expression of her trust in God, but out of compulsion, under pressure from the religious authorities who compel poor widows to give and give even when such giving imperils their existence, even to the point of losing their homes. Jesus does not celebrate her action or call for its imitation, and his commentary on the relative size of the gift is intended as much to minimize the apparent generosity of wealthy people like the scribes. Even though the widow’s act is commendable, it sure seems Jesus would prefer a situation where the wealthy give more and she can keep her two coins.
If this is indeed Jesus’ take on the situation, it offers a helpful counterpoint, even corrective, to the kind of lesson that we tend to take from the passage in 1 Kings and the kind of lesson we tend to draw even from this story. The conventional teaching at this point would be something like we just need to trust in God and all will be well, if you are faithful then everything will turn out fine, God will bless you. We convince ourselves that Scripture teaches that there’s a kind of one-to-one correspondence between faith and material outcomes, as if all the children who have starved to death, all those on whom bombs dropped, all those swept away by floods, all those ravaged by cancer suffered their fates because they didn’t sufficiently trust in God. If we keep believing in God, we know at some level this can’t really be true, but our habits of reading Scripture often prevent us from perceiving and embracing an alternative.
Jesus here not only affirms that faithful people like the widow can suffer, he even seems to suggest that it is that very faithfulness which renders her vulnerable to exploitation by powerful, self-interested people like the scribes. Frankly, the picture Jesus paints here is much darker, yet at the same time more encouraging and comforting exactly because it deals with the harsh realities of life rather than in wishful thinking. The message of the Gospel, after all, is not that trust leads to survival, but that cross leads to resurrection.
One of the lessons we should learn from this passage is that Jesus not only notices people whom others ignore, like this widow, but that he regards her plight and condemns others because of it. The law of Moses made specific mention of and provision for widows, and yet here were the authorities on the law oppressing the very people whom the law was meant to protect. This is the kind of thing that makes Jesus angry, and if we intend to be his followers, then it ought to make us angry too. There are people in our community whom the law is meant to care for but whose basic humans needs go unmet. And while we shouldn’t pretend that this is a problem with an easy fix, at the very least we ought to turn our eyes that direction a bit more often. We ignore the homeless, the addicts, the mentally ill because we’ve got other things on our mind and/or the thought of trying to do anything about it seems overwhelming. I’ve got three old ladies in my building who each live alone, and I regard them more as a source of irritation than as recipients of compassion.
We should also ask ourselves if we are like the scribes. The immediate answer seems to be No, we are not like the scribes because, unlike them, we don’t live in a world where religious pretentiousness works in your favor, nor are we the kind of community that celebrates vacuous piety. I hope. But Jesus’ criticism here is not so much about private attitude as public actions. It's as much economic as spiritual. The whole sacrificial system centered on the temple was essentially pay for worship. (You may recall Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple.) You had to either bring a sacrifice of your own or purchase one to offer. The scribes and their kind perpetuate this system and benefit from it, but they didn’t exactly create it, at least not recently. If you asked them about it, they’d probably say that it’s just way things are, taking for granted that some are on top and some on the bottom exactly because they’re on top. Probably all of us here find ourselves the beneficiaries of an economic system in which we are on top and people on the bottom do the labor and provide the services which makes our lives possible. And we probably also take this for granted, as simply the way things are - if we even think about it at all. There will always be poor people like widows, or unskilled workers, and what can you do about it?
The temptation is simply to feel bad about it then tell yourself that you’re a good person because you feel bad. The proper response is not for us to work to overthrow capitalism, probably, because the question posed to the church is not, “How can we change the world?” but “What does it mean to be faithful? What kind of community must we be? How do we worship God?” And what Jesus is driving at is that our worship of God requires, at the minimum, regard for the least in our community, and even that we need to be thinking seriously about what economic justice looks like amongst sisters and brothers. And if we become too comfortable with the status quo then Jesus might just have to tell his disciples to beware of us.
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