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Around our house we occasionally take to binge watching The Murdoch Mysteries. It’s interesting to see what happens when the clues completely stump even the brilliant mind of Murdoch. Somethings wrong. Something doesn’t add up. The clues lead here but it’s a dead end. That’s usually when the brutishly practical minded Inspector Brackenreid will chime in with something to the effect of, “Well, me ole mucker, follow the money.” Then Murdoch looks at the clues from the perspective of who stands to gain financially from the crime and before you know it the crime is solved. Lesson learned. When something’s wrong around here and things don’t add up, follow the money and you’ll find the truth.
Well, the Gospel of Mark works a bit like that. The point that we are now at in the storyline of the Gospel about Jesus, Son of God, is that there is a horrendous crime about to be committed. Israel is about to crucify its Messiah, the one whom God had promised to send to deliver them from all their oppressors and establish the Kingdom of God on earth. In fact, the crime is even more serious than that. They are about to kill their God who has somehow become human as this man Jesus. If you are following Mark’s story from the perspective of the Twelve Disciples, it is obvious that Jesus has been doing things that only God could do, particularly that calming the Sea thing. For the people of Israel the fulfillment of the prophesied hopes of the prophets was taking place before their very eyes, but they just couldn’t see it. Even the Scribes and the Pharisees, the most learned among them, just couldn’t see it. As outsiders hearing these accounts of Jesus acts and teachings, we should be at the point of thinking something’s wrong here. The clues are there but for some reason the “detectives” aren’t adding them up. If I were Mark, this is the moment I would stage a cameo appearance from Inspector Brackenreid to say, “Well, me ole mucker, follow the money.”
And that’s the point we are at in Mark’s Gospel. We are about to find out what’s wrong with the system, with the way things are, with religion, with politics by following the money. We are at the point when God the Judge decides the merits of our investigation. Jesus, the Son of God, Lord and Saviour, the Messiah, the Holy One of Israel, the Son of David (all those titles we’ve heard him called by in the Gospel), the One who fed those crowds, who calmed the Seas, who cast out demons, who teaches with authority, the one who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey like a king, the one who ran all the big business thieves out of temple and called it his Father’s house; this Jesus, he sat down facing the treasury. The language and the image here is of a judge taking his seat to scrutinize a case and render a judgement.
The chief villain in the case is apparently the Scribes and Jesus is obviously biased against them for he announces that the greatest guilty verdict and sentence will be against them. They are the polar opposite of Jesus. He was a wandering preacher living off donations. They like putting on their lavish robes and saying long prayers that make them sound so godly-ish. They like you to kneel before them when you great them and they expect the best seats at all religious and social gatherings. They think they are soooo special. Why? Well, they know the Law of God Almighty and have the authority to interpret and enforce it…and they also know the loopholes. They are literally the most powerful people in the theocracy of Israel. A theocracy is a state founded on religious law. (Check any Modern day theocracy and you will find that those who judge and rule over the people according to a religious law carry on the same way.)
Jesus told his disciples to beware the Scribes and names one of their specific crimes. They devour the houses of widows. If a husband died and there were no sons to look after the estate or only young children a Scribe would become the executor of the estate because in their patriarchal culture the widow, being a woman, was not considered capable or competent to look after such a matter. This system was set in place to protect widows in a patriarchal system, but…the Scribes had ways to take financial advantage of the situation that in the end often left a widow without resource. The Scribes were profiteering off the vulnerability of the widows they were supposed to protect resulting in many widows losing their homes.
That’s pretty serious business – Bad Business. In the giving of the Law, God was very explicit in several places that widows and orphans were to be protected and provided for in Israel. In last week’s passage when Jesus told that Scribe that the second greatest commandment was to love your neighbour as yourself he was quoting a passage from Leviticus in which that verse is the summary statement of a long list of social justice laws which included providing for widows and orphans. But the rich and powerful in Israel seemed to have a problem with doing that. Several of the prophets, Amos in particular, condemned the wealthy in Israel for such abuses. In fact, taking advantage of the poor in the land by the religious and political authorities who grew wealthier by doing so is the reason God cast the Israelites off the land into exile in Babylon and let the Babylonian armies destroy the temple. God got mad about their idolatry, but when they started to abuse their own poor for profit, that’s when God let them have it. More about that next week when Jesus pronounces to his disciples that the temple will be destroyed again.
After announcing his judicial prejudice against the Scribes Jesus followed the money and takes his judgement seat across from the treasury. This could be one of two places in the Temple complex. In the Women’s Court, where women gathered as they weren’t allowed into other “more important” parts of the Temple, there were thirteen chests for people to throw coins into. Some assume that the widow we are about to meet was here because she was a woman and had only coins. But Mark said it was the Treasury that Jesus sat down in front of to scrutinize. The way giving worked in the Treasury was that you came and made a public pronouncement of how much you were giving and declared what it was to be used for.
As Jesus watched this public display of donating he noticed “something’s wrong here”. Honorably, people were giving generously to the Temple for its upkeep and the provision of the Scribes and Priests and as we’ll find out next week it was a beautiful Temple. Let’s not fault the wealthy here, they were giving generously as they should have been. (Oh to have a few wealthy donors around here doing as honorably to our churches.) But…Jesus noted that it’s not really costing them anything. Their giving isn’t sacrificial, might I say.
Then, almost as a matter of civil disobedience, or prophetic condemnation, up comes a widow to the treasury. I can imagine her as being a bit feisty and going to the table of the ledger keeper with a bit of a scowl and announcing “Here’s my last two cents. Feed a Scribe.” That’s the way I want to imagine it, but not likely how it happened. The gift probably went unnoticed by everybody except Jesus who noted that she had just given everything she had; indeed, her whole life. She could no longer buy food. This woman who had lost her worth and dignity due to her husband’s death and being the likely victim of Scribal profiteering had just sacrificially given her whole life…at the treasury…of the Temple. Talk about your money trails and where they lead. This widow was doing what Jesus himself had come to do. Jesus had come to give his life to give humanity back its worth and dignity. What an astonishingly great act of generosity by a very poor, anonymous widow who had no worth or dignity to give… because it had been stolen from her by Death and by spiritual abuse.
But wait a minute. Something’s wrong here. Why are people giving all this money to a Temple building and the institution surrounding it when there are poor widows in their midst? And worse why is this poor widow giving everything she has left to this blatant display of abuse and hypocrisy? Is this what faith and faithfulness is…simply giving money to an institution that bears God’s name? It reminds me of all those TV ministries particularly back in the 80’s and 90’s that would tell you to give to them and God would give back to you a hundredfold. A couple of years ago one of the coin boxes at Joel Osteen’s Houston complex was stolen. $600,000 was its estimated worth, a coin box with one weekend’s givings. $600,000 for whatever Osteen uses money for? Good look following the money there. Please don’t give to those folks especially when your local churches and food banks are running deficits and particularly large ones due to COVID.
Returning to Mark, a day or so earlier in the Gospel, some Pharisees and some Cronies of the King, the Herodians, tried to entrap Jesus over the question of whether to pay taxes to Caesar. To pay the Caesar tax you had to have Roman coin. Roman coins had images of Caesar on them and the words “Lord and Saviour”. All Jews considered it idolatrous to carry Roman money. If you remember the Children’s Church object lesson Jesus gave them, he showed them a Roman coin, asked whose image was on it, and told them to repay Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s. We have to note that Jesus was not himself carrying any Roman coin and that he had to borrow it from them. Thus, here’s some devout Pharisees carrying little idols of Caesar in their money pouches because they believed they needed it to live in a Roman world. Another thing to notice, the word repay is debt language and Jesus forced them to ask themselves to whom they were more indebted: Caesar or God? They owed the false god Caesar for safe roads, an oppressing army, and the continuation of their privileged status. But they owed God for their life. They owe God the greater debt and should repay God with the service of their whole lives…not this Caesar with whom they were colluding in taking advantage of the poor.
Well, this poor widow apparently understands that her life belongs to God and wants to entrust what little there was left of it to the God who gave it to her in the first place. When somebody in such desperate situation gives their last little bit like this poor widow did obviously something is wrong here. Was it an act of protest, or a desperate bargain with God, or had she just plain given up? We don’t know. What we do know is that out of her poverty she gave all she had – her whole life – while those who had a lot, though they gave large gifts, their gifts really cost them nothing.
At the heart of that “something wrong” was that the hypocritical religious institution of the Temple had become a devouring idol due to decades to centuries of Scribal corruption. The Temple was supposed to be the place where God dwelt and people should have been able to come and be in God’s presence. The Temple was supposed to be the place where the poor could come and receive justice and the help they needed. Instead, like Caesar’s coins, the temple had become an idol and the Scribes bore the bulk of the responsibility for that happening. The people, both the wealthy and this poor widow, were simply giving money to an idol who devours the vulnerable and makes hypocrites out of those who give generously.
Usually, this passage of Scripture comes up on Stewardship themed Sunday’s when we take time to remember that we and all that we have and are belong to God. We consider our generosity in our giving of time and talents and money and so forth. Do we try to grow in generosity to where our giving actually costs us something, which is the pattern set forth by Jesus, or are we just giving what costs us nothing?
But we need to think about what we are giving to as well. As a minister, I have to entertain the thought of how much am I like a Scribe in an institution that’s exists by the generosity of people living on pensions. Does my salary come from somebody’s last two pennies? I hope not. I remember in university giving the last $50 I had for the month to a church parking lot fund which meant I had to go about a week and a half with no gas or food money. That was stupid. But, I felt I had to do my part and was being told God would bless those gifts. That sounds like a wicked thing, but on the other side of the matter, I’m reasonably sure that if the leadership of that church had found out that I did that, they would have found a way to have given it back with a little extra. So, we should be careful how we judge churches and money. It truly is a rare church that is into profiteering off the spiritual needs of people and most of them are on TV.
God asks us to give to support our local church ministries and the ministers we employ. In these COVID times our churches are running deficits and we can’t fundraise like we used to. This obviously means our personal financial support of our church needs to increase. Moreover, there are needs in our communities and in the world that we need to be generous with as well. There’s a huge need for food in Afghanistan and in our local food banks right now. There is something wrong around here in that global food prices are increasing due to people profiteering on food in these COVID times especially and it ain’t the local farmer. The local farmer isn’t being shown the money. But, here I am asking the local farmer to give money to programs that will feed people the food they grew. Somethings wrong here.
Anyway, I’ve rambled enough. I’ll close by saying that God provides for us so that we can help provide for others. God gives to us so that we may give to others. That’s the supply chain in God’s Kingdom. When we put a hold on that and start keeping to ourselves, then that’s when that proverbial something starts going wrong around here. Amen.
