The Widow’s Mite

Kingdom 2—Trinity 22                8 November 2009

The Gospel lesson this morning is a strange one, although it may seem quite familiar.  You and I have heard the story about the widow’s mite for a long time and I daresay you have always heard the same explanation for it that I have: Jesus is holding up the example of the widow who gave everything she had to live on as an example of extreme generosity, worth more than the offerings of the rich who did not miss what they gave as much as she did.

That is the trouble with old familiar parts of the Bible: you can take for granted that you know what they mean without looking at them in depth or from a fresh perspective.  I had occasion to talk about the Gospel with two other priests this week and when I returned to my study I consulted my commentary on the passage and, behold, what Jesus was saying turns out to be something different than I had thought.

Let us start with the recognition that the temple in Jesus’ day was a very rich place.  The temple clergy were part of the aristocracy and the wealthy families of Jerusalem were benefactors of the temple and considered it a symbol of their own cultural and religious importance.  The place was notoriously corrupt in the eyes of many reformers—including the Essenes and some of the Pharisees.  Jesus’ warning in the first verses of our lesson this morning concerns the scribes—that is, the group from which the temple leaders came.  His criticism is that they are very aware of their importance and not only command public respect for their religious significance, but purchase their status by unfairly taking advantage of the poor.  It was not only the rich who paid their tithes and made their offerings.  All were expected to pay their tithes.  Even widows.

Interestingly enough there are Old Testament laws that are meant to exempt the poor from having to give to the temple and the religious establishment and instead make a claim on that same establishment for their support.  Instead of paying tithes, these poor, including widows and orphans, are to be supported from the tithes of the rest of the community.  But when you have a big important temple to run, a rich place with lots of important people living off its income, you need offerings from everyone—widows and orphans included.  Jesus’ criticism of the scribes is that “they devour widows’ houses”—that is, even the vulnerable are under a lot of social and religious pressure to help maintain the religious and political establishment.  

So when Jesus sits and watches the folks coming to the temple with their contributions he sees the wealthy putting in their great sums and a poor widow putting in two little coins, which between them make only enough money to buy a handful of flour.  Yet, poor as she is, she throws the coins into the treasury, causing Jesus to remark that “this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury.  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.”   Yet Jesus is not praising her.  He is lamenting the fact that this poor woman felt she owed it to God to give away to the temple what she needed to eat—and she scarcely had enough for that!  He is condemning the system that led her to think that in this way she was worshipping God when God was not requiring the food out of her mouth.  It was his intention that she be supported by the very temple which was robbing her of her own living.

I am not sure that I can explain exactly what we are to take from this event.  But a several things seem clear to me.  First, most of us here are not anywhere near in piety to that widow from our Gospel lesson.  We are not about to put in the offering the last ten dollars we need to buy food for our evening meal.  Hardly any of us contribute to God’s work and God’s church out of our poverty.  We are more like the rich in the story who give out of their abundance.  And that is acceptable.  The pattern in the New Testament is not the tithe.  The New Testament rule for giving is to give as God has prospered you.  If you make a lot of money, then give a lot of money.  Don’t buy a second house if you don’t need it, but support a missionary or endow a ministry.  If you lose your job and can hardly make ends meet, then, for God’s sake, do not try to give money to the Church.  This does not mean that there is no room for sacrifice—even the less well-off need to offer to God their gifts.  We have our tradition of mite-boxes to prove that small offerings are still important ones.  But God does not want the food out of your mouth.

Which leads to the second point: it is God’s intention that the community of people called by His Name should support the most weak and vulnerable among them.  Instead of requiring offerings from the poor we ought to make sure they have enough to eat and that they can pay their rent.  That may be difficult to do in times of real economic distress, but that is where our hearts are.

And that leads to the final point: God intends that all of us together are working for the good of all—good in its widest sense—and not simply for our personal benefit.  Sometimes I think that buildings and programs and budgets are a curse and only detract us from our real mission.  But then I realize that in a physical world you have to have buildings and budgets and payrolls.  But the main point is still the same: everything must work towards the good of all the people involved.  People are not to be held hostage to the institution.  That is a good political as well as religious rule of thumb: a system that requires human sacrifice to maintain itself is not right.  That is, a system which eats up people in order to maintain itself is evil.  The system—political or religious—is meant to procure the common good, the welfare of all, not to leverage the well-being of a few onto the backs of the many—as the ancient temple system in Jerusalem did.

We are very blessed at St Thomas that our ancestors did not bequeath us a set of buildings that hold us hostage in the way that several churches in our own diocese are held hostage.  It takes us money to maintain our house of worship and our house of fellowship and the house of the priest.  The system doesn’t function as well as it once did, because the relative costs for these various components have changed over the years.  We have always felt it our duty not to put so much money into program and staff that we had little left over for the poor, and so we have maintained ourselves in a fairly lean manner over the years—doing with little secretarial help, for example, and scrimping in other ways.  But we have always given away money to the poor and have lived by the rule that what we do together should work towards the well-being of all.  And God has taken care of us, through the support of the people who care about what we are doing.

In a little while we will be asking again for some indication of what you might do next year in support of the Church, but all of the things I have mentioned hold true: we give out of what God has given us proportionally to His generosity to us.  Some have experienced the generosity of God in emotional and spiritual ways rather than in financial ones lately—so let us each give as God has given to us—seriously and in obedience to His Spirit working in us.  Let us as we pray and think always make sure that what we do together contributes to the well-being—spiritual and emotional and physical—of us all, that none are leveraged for the sake of others.  And maybe if we practice this in the Church, God will show us how to practice it outside of the Church too.