Out of Their Abundance

You can’t really blame Jesus for going off on the Pharisees at the beginning of our text for this week. He’s just endured a long adversarial chapter being challenged and questioned and sneered at for what they thought were his beliefs. Sure, he was up to the challenge, and he was winning over the crowd. Mark included a telling sentence at the end of verse 37 when he wrote “and the large crowd was listening to him with delight.” One wonders about the source of that delight. Were they simply happy to see the power holders get their comeuppance? Or is there something else there? Was their delight growing out of the affirmation that their suspicion that they had been sold a bill of goods as to what makes a good life was right after all? Was Jesus turning everything they had been taught about how to get ahead in this life upside down and it resonated deeply with them?

What they had been taught was that God works through deals. You do this and I’ll do that. Easy, or rather simple. You do your bit and once in a while do more than your bit. Pay a little extra and get a better seat at God’s table. Put in some overtime, split hairs on the detail of the law and you’ll get a nice long robe and watch everyone in the marketplace bow to you as you pass. That’s how their world worked, that’s how the pharisees got to where they were. They did their bit, they served their time. Sure, maybe they had to foreclose on a widow or two, but business is business after all. And to make up for it look how much they gave, how much went into the offering box. Isn’t that what we want, more in the plate?

Jesus throws a monkey wrench into the whole works. “Beware,” Jesus says, “of this way of thinking. Beware of the attitude that it produces. Beware of turning people into commodities and forgetting relationships in favor of status. Beware.” And then he embodies this wariness by going to take a seat opposite the offering boxes in the forecourt of the temple.

You can almost feel the weary sigh in the depths of his soul as he watched the production of giving played out in front of him. Attitude. There are plenty of attitude in the forecourt of the temple. Plenty of attitude displayed in front of the collection boxes, all thirteen of them. They weren’t really boxes. They were more like long trumpets. You put your money in the wide bell end, and it rolled down to the collection end. And they were metal. So every time the coins were dropped in, the clink and the clank would sound all over the temple courtyard. Plenty of attitude and lots of noise. Some would try to impress with how loud a sound they could make as they poured in their coins. They would have unspoken contests as they rushed to clank down more coins. So there was clanking and clinking until it began to sound like the slot machines at Caesar’s Palace.

In the midst of all this hubbub, a poor widow makes her way to offering boxes. As a counterpoint to the clinking and clanking of the large gold and silver coins being thrust into the boxes, a faint plink is heard as two copper coins are dropped in by the widow. Hardly worth noticing. Compared to the clank of gold and the clink of silver, the plink of copper sounds rather pathetic. And this copper is hardly worth bending down to pick them up out of the gutter. The Greek name for them is “lepta.” King James called them mites. Mites? Who wants mites? Sounds like something you would spray your house to get rid of.

But, and here’s the strange part, as she dropped them in, Jesus said to whoever would hear, “Look there, that poor widow has put in more than all those clinkers and clankers.” No way, his disciples shout. You can just see Matthew whipping out his phone and firing up the calculator app, ready to give Jesus a simple lesson in accounting. “Look here, Jesus,” he says, fingers a blur on the keys, “two lepta together amount to just a bit above nothing, Something like .00001% of what one of those guys with the big cars and long robes gave.”

Jesus says, “you got your figures wrong,” which is a terrible thing to say to an accountant like Matthew. “You see,” Jesus continues as Matthew punches in the same numbers again and again, “they put in the extra that they had, what they didn’t need anyway so they might as well buy a little prestige with it. But she put in what she had. They gave out their abundance, she gave everything she had, her whole living.” And Matthew listened, understood, and closed the app and deleted it. To the questioning looks from the other disciples, he simply shrugged and said, “I gotta work to a different scale now.”

The widow gave. No one expected her to, no one would have blamed her for not giving. Yet she gave. She dug deep down into her bleak existence and gave all she had. She sacrificed the bit of grain, a meager meal that should have purchased with that money, small as it was. She dug deep enough to feel her generosity.

This is the exact opposite of giving from abundance. Giving enough to feel. The problem we have with a stewardship emphasis is that we can hardly wait to get through it so that we can get back to faith, and hope, and bible study, back to the real stuff. Except that what you do with the talents and resources you have, that God has given you, IS the real stuff. There isn’t anything more than that. If your faith, your Christianity gives you a warm feeling once in a while but never touches your wallet, then you haven’t been hearing this truth from Jesus. If being a Christian means you don’t swear too often or drink too much, but you are never moved to give more than you really can, you’ve missed the point. If following Christ means for you saying certain things and believing certain things, but does not mean that we are accountable for our belongings as much as for our actions then we have only scratched the surface. Most of us spend too much time on the surface of faith: debates and discussions, feelings and favorite hymns, pennies and potluck dinners. We are dealing with the topsoil, with the outer limits of our responsibility. Christ calls us to dig deep. To go beyond the surface, deeper than easy answers, beneath the comfort and confidence that all is right with the world.

This truth invites us to dig deep into our attitude for giving and to realize that sometimes, like the widow, all we have is not enough, but more than enough. And by giving up what we think we can’t live without; we find a freedom to truly live. God will bless that response.