He sat down opposite the treasury and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, 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.”
Mark 12:41-44
We have a tendency, when it comes to things like money, to make comparisons. “I took a pay cut to take this job,” someone might say. We consider the comparative prices of homes, phones, gallons of milk. We pay attention to sales, with such-and-such a percentage off, or what a drop in interest rates might mean for our mortgage if we were to refinance. This is a thing that currency does—in fact, it’s the thing that currency is for: it makes us able to compare one thing to another. It’s a way we come to agree with one another about the value of a thing.
But in Mark 12:41-44, Jesus wants to undermine all of that. He sees some bigwigs put some fat checks in the offering plates in the public area of the temple in the back—the kinds of tithes that come with a handful of zeros—and then he sees a lowly widow approach the treasury and deposit two little coins. And I mean little. In the original Greek, Mark explains that the two coins added together make up one quadrans, the smallest form of currency that was ever made in Roman times. The coins she tosses in aren’t even a penny—they’re each half a penny. And what does Jesus say? He says unambiguously in verse 43 that she her two half pennies add up to more than the bigwigs’ fat old checks.
The fact checkers among us (and among Jesus’ hearers) might like to quibble with Jesus here. “Uh, Jesus? That’s just not true. Because .01 dollars is less than thousands of dollars. Because of, uh, math?” And we fact checkers would be right—at least about the math side of things. But we might be reminded that, as God in flesh, Jesus wasn’t stupid: he wasn’t talking about the math of it at all.
What Jesus does in Mark 12 is displace us from our normal way of valuing things. Currency is meant to be compared, and we are glad to oblige. We are inclined to say that the widow’s one red cent pales in comparison to the contributions of the well-heeled. Jesus wants us to reconsider this kind of valuing. He wants us to see her gift for what it is: everything. It’s her whole livelihood, as some translations render it. (The Greek is even more forceful: it says it’s her whole “life.”) What makes it valuable is not the dollar amount, the impact it has on the temple’s bottom line. What makes it valuable is how it shows her faith that God will take care of her through this congregation.
Jesus tells us that the rich folks give out of their wealth; but the worthy widow gave out of her poverty. And that’s the kind of giving that we, too, should be doing.
I had been thinking about this text along these lines before these last few weeks with the virus that has now devastated the world over—and also our own local communities. In the more recent days, the most challenging sides of Jesus’ call that we give out of our poverty has struck me. At first, I thought about how we are today discovering new forms of poverty: after all, hand sanitizer is worth its weight in gold these days, and toilet paper is nowhere to be found. And it remains the case, I think, that it would be incredibly meaningful to tithe hand soap or N95 masks this week. Those precious commodities that we are inclined to hoard because they are so valuable to us—they are exactly the sorts of things we ought to be willing to sacrifice in a situation like our present moment.
But as the news has come in from China and Iran and Italy and now New York, it has become more apparent to me that there are more biting ways that this virus shows us how poor we all are. There is a remarkable shift going on right now in the way we value things and ourselves and one another. We are rightly troubled by what we see in our newspapers about the Dow and the S&P, and yet, we all recognize that it’s important to risk economic declines to ensure that we aren’t forced to make the kinds of choices that are being made in Italy even this very moment. To ensure that the ones we love—indeed, even our very selves—aren’t at risk of losing our lives because overwhelmed hospitals don’t have enough ventilators to keep us breathing.
This is, in truth, the one form of poverty that none of us can evade: our poverty of time, of years, of visits with those we care about, of opportunities to learn and laugh and smell the saltwater at the beach and hold crying babies and share meals with our families of origin and our families of choice. None of us will live forever and none of us, as the twelfth chapter of Luke reminds us, are able to hoard extra time on earth, or to know when our time will come (Luke 12:20-21). Our lives, the most precious thing we have, are short-lived, but a moment before God (39:4-5, Psalm 144:4).
And that is what Jesus wants us to see in the widow’s gift. Her confidence that God will care for her to the degree that she gives away all she has—her whole life in the Greek, remember—to the temple treasury. Not out of her abundance, but out of her poverty, she gives away the most precious gifts she has.
I wonder what that means for us. What do you prize, what is most precious to you? What is your life wrapped up in? What feels like it is your whole life? What do you treasure that might be better used to glorify God in someone else’s hands? What do you need to be willing to give over to God, in the confidence that God will return it to you a hundredfold (Mark 10:29-30)? These are the things that Jesus wants us to consider. Not because of the number of zeroes at the end, but because of what our being willing to offer our most prized possessions teaches us: to have faith in God’s provision and care.
After all, there is at least one good reason to do so. For when Jesus told his disciples that the widow’s gift of her very life was worthy of emulation, he wasn’t just spouting another one of those colorful parables. He was anticipating his own gift, which we’ll remember in a few weeks on Good Friday—his gift, just like the widow’s, of his very life. We have every reason to have confidence, with the widow Jesus praises, that God will provide for us because God already has done so in Jesus Christ. And God will continue to bless us even, or perhaps especially, in these worrying and strenuous times. Let us not be loath to give out of our poverty to the God who loves us so dearly. Amen.