On Friday, after completing a successful battle with cancer, a family friend went in for an all-clear scan and instead it revealed a couple of new spots on his liver. The future he was ready to step into vanished and what lays ahead is more upheaval and unknown.
Two days ago, Afghanistan and Pakistan declared war on each other, and yesterday Israel and America began bombing Iran. All air traffic across the entire Middle East is suspended because the risk of commercial planes being hit by missiles and air defense systems is “extremely high.”I may not have paid much attention to all of this on my Saturday except that my son is in India. Next door to Pakistan, with Iran in between him and me. Will it be safer for him to fly home in 6 days when his trip ends? Or will it be more dangerous? I have no idea. And I have no way to protect him or myself from this world’s risks and dangers, or from reckless actions of those charged with caring for the welfare of others, whose decisions have consequences.
It’s an outrageously precarious thing to be human. We are fragile and mortal, tossed about by things we can’t control and scrambling always for stable ground and a sense of security and well-being.
And when we get some, we try to get more, we invest our money and tend our good health and build on our reputation and carefully curate our identity and try to store it all up and stretch it all out, because who knows when our security could be lost or who might try to take it from us. And those with more power and control keep gaining and those with less power and control keep losing, and pretty soon the haves and the have nots are so far apart we aren’t seeing each other anymore, and we may not be in dire straits like the generous widow but at least we’re not arrogant and oppressive like the villainous scribes, and we’ve forgotten that every one of us dies, and none of us can take any of it with us when we go.
For generations, the widow in this story was used as a morality tale of selfless generosity – give all you have even when that’s nothing, because your everything is what God deserves. We compared ourselves to her and felt convicted to give more, give our all (subtext: in order to be a good person and secure our stability with God and in heaven).
Then, for the last couple of decades, the scholarship flipped. Now the story became about the self-important scribes, and the broken system that is supposed to take care of widows and orphans instead bankrupting their households, and an impoverished woman who puts everything she has into the coffer, while the leaders parade around making themselves look good and their own temple giving costs them nothing.
But when we center human beings and behavior, not only do we, ironically, end up dehumanizing the people—both the woman and the scribes—but overlook the main character by forgetting that the bible is the story of God. So, I want to look at Jesus today instead.
Jesus is in the temple in Jerusalem, the temple he rode to on Palm Sunday and raged through the following day, driving out moneychangers and flipping over tables and yelling that what is supposed to be a house of prayer for all nations has become a den of robbers.
He has now been teaching in the temple for several days. The leaders keep trying to corner him, and he keeps wriggling out of their rhetorical traps by turning attention back to God. Over and over, they spar.
Then one scribe asks Jesus what the most important commandment is, and Jesus answers, “to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and the second is to love your neighbor as yourself. There is no greater commandment than these.”
The scribe replies, “You’re right – this is much more important than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
And Jesus, recognizing his wisdom, says, ‘You are not far from the Kingdom of heaven.” And, we’re told “no one dared ask him anything after that.”
So by the time this scene unfolds, there’s been some history between Jesus and the temple leaders – he has praised one for seeing to the heart of things and now calls out others for missing the whole point. And now here comes this widow – whose security and identity in society is just about the lowest and most precarious it could be.
Her offering is 1/32 of one day’s wage; it wouldn’t buy her even a bite of one meal. If her two coins had been laying visible in the dusty, dung-filled street, you yourself wouldn’t bother to pick them up. But Jesus lifts up her offering as worth more than all the rest of the money combined. Even, perhaps, more than the temple itself.
Immediately after this incident the disciples are leaving the temple with Jesus, and they pause to comment admiringly on its stunning architecture and massive grandeur. Jesus sighs, “‘Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.’”
There are things that last and things that don’t, and we mix up the two terribly.
This whole story has taken place in that temple, the house of prayer, where the God of the whole world, of creation and all nations, of future and past, who cannot be contained within walls, will nevertheless be with God’s people. God resides with the people themselves; it is in them whom God’s Spirit dwells. But instead of the holy people meeting God in this holy place, this has become a space of grandstanding and showdowns, ostentatious wealth and crass comparisons, with access to God doled out to some, and withheld from others.
And yet, here in the middle of all that mess and sin, sits God with us. In the noise and bustle of the temple world, amongst all the busy, impressive people, he locks in on this disregarded woman. He sees her. He invites the disciples to see her. And then, to their surprise, Jesus praises her trust and her faithfulness above all others combined.
When she gives her all she is living in the real reality the others are forgetting or overlooking. In gratitude, she gives what she has, because she belongs entirely to God. Her life is not her own to protect or preserve. She will be upheld by God by the hands of her neighbors, through the love and care of those around her – this is so foundational to the identity of the people of God and the commands of God that it is written into the law that these same scribes taught to others: “true religion is this: to care for orphans and widows.” This is the way of God. To love God and neighbor, which the wise scribe has just laid out helpfully so that we have it in mind when we witness this moment. Whether the rest of the embodied people of God in the temple that day are living in obedience to that or not, she is. She brings all she has to God and entrusts herself completely to God’s care.
We can turn our gaze from the widow back to the pompous scribes and make the story about them, feed off the outrage about what should be happening, relish the criticism of the evil, stoke our disgust that those in power would abuse it, that the systems and structures are so broken, and that corruption is so rampant and that we can’t trust the people in power.
And, certainly, we will always have plenty of material in front of us for that kind of project.
But Jesus points out – justice comes for us all. Cruelty, idiocy, empire, and even stability and temple, will crumble. But that’s not where the truth of life and living is to be found.
Because this is God’s story, not ours. In God’s Kingdom there are only human beings, interconnected, all, taking turns in need, taking turns having something to give, and most often, all of it at the same time. And our short time here alive in this way is for something more than avoiding pain and dodging death. It’s for a deeper kind of relationship to the planet and everyone around us and can’t be taken or made, can only be received and shared.
The widow just has fewer delusions than the rest of the bunch. There is less standing in the way of her dependence on God and connection to others. She doesn’t have the resources or capacity for self-reliance to pretend this is about what she can do. She is more available to the truth that is true of all of us: Our wellbeing and identity were never ours to construct or protect to begin with. There is someone greater looking out for us all and leading everything, always, toward redemption.
She is living how we are all called to live, a life of sacrifice and worship –our whole lives, which were not even ours to begin with, lived back toward God, in response to the love of God that claims and sustains us all, trusting God to take care of us and to be the community through whom God works.
Governments topple and temples crumble. Bodies get sick and stock markets crash and world orders falter and systems are broken. All people do selfish things and some people do evil things, and everything that we lean into for security and safety will eventually disappoint and undoubtedly disappear.
Only love continues – love eternal that broke into time and invaded our lives. Love is the breath of the Spirit that moved over the waters, and voice of the Almighty who speaks it all into being, and the vulnerability of the human one who crept in beside us, and who, on that particular day, sat there watching all the beloved ones in the temple, and pulled back the veneer to show those who were paying attention that things are upside down and inside out from how we think they are, and there is far more going on than we can see.
When Martin Luther was asked what he would do if he knew the world was ending, he answered, “I would plant an apple tree.” And when the widow reached the coffer, she dropped in her last two coins. The world is held in God, and our future is God’s in love alone.
And right in the midst of the chaos and the fear, Jesus is here, holding both the terrible injustice and the deeply faithful sacrifice and inviting us to pay attention. He sees us plainly, in our own self-absorption and reaching, and in our gratitude and dependence. May we see him too, and may we trust.
Amen.
Amen.
