Jesus doesn’t simply criticize the priests for their hubris, he exposes the whole system for its corruption, exploitation, and rejection of the poor.
of poverty and hubris in the Temple
Proper 27B | Mark 12:38-44
Less than a week after starting at my first congregation out of seminary, I went to my first clericus—a meeting of all the clergy in our deanery. We met for lunch and the conversation drifted toward how much the world has changed.
Being the youngest, not yet 30 years-old and fresh-faced, I was struck by how my elders spoke of their sense of a loss of respect. One said “remember when we used to get out of traffic tickets” and I heard how I should wear a collar in my driver’s license picture. They complained about how many perks, how much privilege they used to receive.
My heart was broken by the selfishness and pride my colleagues expressed. And as a son of a priest, this talk was nothing like anything I had experienced, either at home or among his colleagues. My Dad was embarrassed by people’s generosity, not greedy for it.
Dress Up
Long before we wore our clerical collars with blue jeans, we wore suits. And before the suits (remember, suits were ushered in with the business-class transformation of the church with the priest as CEO and vestries as his board of directors) we wore cassocks — the black, button-up robes. These were the clothes we wore everywhere. And before that…other liturgical vestments which set us off as different. All the way back to these Jesus is watching. Critiquing.
These men, preening and vying for the opportunity to be seen, to have their sacrifices known, the honor of their place constantly bestowed. Hungry for respect with an appetite uneasily sated.
Obviously, the length of their fringe isn’t the problem. Looking fashionable or seeking an outside to match the inside is not Jesus’s problem with these men. It’s what status brings them and does to them: they’re willing to devour the houses of the poor.
Devouring the Poor
Two years ago, the radio program On the Media did a series called “Busted: America’s Poverty Myths”. They sought to get at the truth of what is really going on with poverty beyond the stuff we tell ourselves and one another. Because, as the show’s host, Brooke Gladstone describes:
“People in extremity often do things that don’t make sense to people who aren’t.”
To get insight into what we’re missing about people in extremity, she interviewed Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.
One of the people Desmond interviewed for his book was a neighbor named Lorraine. She spent 70% of her income renting a trailer the city had declared a biohazard. She kept it neat and tidy. Eventually, she was evicted.
They noted that a quarter of those living below the poverty line spends some 70% of their income on rent.
In Lorraine’s case, that left her $5 a day.
Lorraine made her family, friends, and pastor crazy because she’d skip rent and yet pay for cable and expensive face creams. They couldn’t understand why she’d waste her money that way.
What they couldn’t see was how little difference these choices would make to the bottom line. Even if she didn’t “waste” her money, the numbers would never add up. Saving $50 doesn’t make $250 appear to pay the bill.
Lorraine wasn’t just poor, she wasn’t even a part of the stable poor. She was well below that.
One day she spent her entire month’s food stamps on lobster tail, shrimp, crab legs, salad, and lemon meringue pie and ate it all alone. It was the anniversary of her late boyfriend’s death and she wanted to honor him.
Desmond didn’t know how he was supposed to feel about his temporary neighbor.
“She made me realize my job wasn’t to apologize for her behavior or to hide it. It’s to try to understand it…So if you’re Lorraine, what do you do? You pepper the suffering with color.”
“I think that writing about that is something we need to do because there’s these two ways to dehumanize people. One is to cleanse people of all virtue and the other is to remove all sin from their lives.”
The Widow’s Mite
Then Jesus sits down opposite to the treasury — a fascinating place for Jesus to sit, by the way, opposite to the treasury. He watches people come and go and drop money in the plate. Not paper bills or checks in envelopes, but coins. Each with a clink or a clang as it is all brass, silver, or gold coins.
The sound is conspicuous, the raining sound of the deep pockets, flooding the plate with generous offerings, noticeable by its sheer volume.
Now Jesus has turned his focus. It isn’t the Temple leadership demonstrating their piety with fancy clothes, it’s the people entering the Temple for their offering. The money raining into the plate to show their importance and influence.
It was only the day before that Jesus came to this same place, the great Temple of God’s and drove out the moneychangers and the livestock sellers. How he disrupted the selling of animals for sacrifice — a system which allowed the wealthy to sacrifice the animals God most favors and the poor…if they could afford anything at all…what God least favors.
A system which, intentionally or not, ensures the wealthy would receive the most of God’s favor.
Favor
These bookends at the Temple topple our justifications and pride. They humiliate our lack of humility. They condemn the way we condemn each other.
For among all these people demanding attention and declaring their greatness and piety, who gets Jesus’s attention, but the widow! The one dropping in a couple of pennies — all that she has.
All these people demanding admiration and influence and this woman receives Jesus’s pity. A far more valuable resource.
Jesus draws our attention to her. Knowing that being poor, being the unstable poor with truly nothing but the clothes on your back, in much of the world and much of human history, is a death sentence. She is now only days from her cross.
Serving the Poor
Every three years, this story lands on the day we invite people to pledge to the church. What an awkward situation, isn’t it? And it tends to lead to familiar calls to sacrificial giving like this widow or calls to remember what we can do in our community to help the poor. These are good charges to our church and to our community.
The poverty rate for Vigo County as of 2016 is 18% and one-quarter of our children are being raised in poverty. Our poverty rates are well above the state average; we rank fifth.
We have deep needs in our community and our ongoing commitment to serve this population through Salvation Army’s back to school and Thanksgiving and Christmas food programs, Toys for Tots, United Campus Ministries’ Food Pantry, and our ever-increasing commitment to turning the tide of homelessness reflects a commitment St. Stephen’s has had for a long time.
We are doing good work in this community. But rather than see this as another feather in a cap, jewel in a crown, a demand for a pat on the back, what if we all took Jesus’s lead and sat opposite to our community’s treasury. Not to condemn or judge, nor demand our greatness shine.
What if we sat with him there to see it in action.
That poverty is our Temple problem. And Jesus is our Temple solution. He draws us away from the sin of pride and toward a conviction of love. A crazy love which encourages sacrificial giving and life-saving grace. Of transforming our cruel systems which ignore those who fall through the cracks to instead engineer new ways of ensuring everyone is loved and fed their daily bread.
And then when he stands up, we stand up. Following Jesus away from the Temple and toward the cross. Because he knows that only in sacrifice can we know true mercy. Only in love can we know true love. Only in being transformed by almighty God can we go about transforming this community into God’s great kin-dom.
May we, working all together, bring this eternal hope into the world. With a love which goes all the way back to creation. A radical transformation which always makes the old things new. And an incredible mercy which brings us to the same table to wage reconciliation. This is who we are, who God has called us to be, and how we make this fractured world whole.
May the transforming power of God’s love fill our tired hearts because there are many more steps on this journey. And may the daily bread we pray for greet us again tomorrow.