In all four gospels, Jesus taught that the temple, the center of worship and faith for the Jewish people of his day, was hopelessly corrupted, and therefore obsolete.
The issue, as is often the case with Jesus, was economics. The temple had become a racket. The religious leaders of that time, like the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century, created theologies out of whole cloth that commended and defended the rich and powerful and excoriated and burdened the poor and powerless. So Jesus began his visit to Jerusalem that Passover week with a powerful demonstration: he drove the moneychangers and merchants out of the temple, drying up the money faucet.
Mark tells us that Jesus’ crowds were delighted. The popularity of Jesus’ critique of temple corruption was tremendously threatening to the rich religious elite, just as the popularity Martin Luther’s 99 Theses were a threat to the riches of the Roman Catholic Church.
This is an ancient sin of Israel, beginning with the drunken worship of the golden calf. Biblically, the worship of money, and the oppression it causes, always ended in disaster. Greed and oppression of the poor led to the fall of Israel and the fall of Judah, as is reported in literally just about every prophet we have.
Scribes were often appointed by males to be the executor of their wills, leaving their widows unrepresented legally. Like some shady lawyers do today, those scribes could twist the law to cheat the widow out of her inheritance, leaving her with nothing.
And right on cue, such a widow arrives at the temple. Jesus notices how easily the wealthy drop large sums in the temple, which of course would earn them social capital. The widow, on the other hand, has been so impoverished she has only a couple of pennies to give.
And she chooses to give them both.
She who was victimized by her own religious establishment, she who was left with nothing but a few pennies, she who could not be blamed for turning her back on God, nevertheless continued to believe, continued to turn her whole life over to the care of God.
Jesus is not saying that poor people should give up what little they have to God. Nor does this anecdote imply that a bunch of retired people living on fixed incomes should impoverish themselves to support the church.
This is not really a passage about stewardship. It’s about the power of passionate faith to sustain those who suffer injustice, who leave God’s justice in God’s hands, who are able to maintain shalom: peace with God, with their neighbors, and even with their oppressors.
Turn the other cheek. Pray for your enemies. Be generous with your excess to anyone who asks. Love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself, and the Spirit of God will leave that obsolete temple and enter into your very heart. You will enter the kingdom of God.
We may find it hard to identify with the widow. We in America enjoy a quality of life high above many countries around the world, but this does not mean that everyone doesn’t experience unfairness at some time or another. Jesus came preaching a way to maintain peace in those moments, a way to sustain a living faith even when you feel God has abandoned you, because he rightly saw a terrible crisis on the horizon, the destruction and fall of the Jewish religious state, together with its all-important temple.
Jesus spoke about building a house on rock versus building a rock on sand, given the expectation of a flood. The worship of idols like money and power was the building of sandcastles, as Scripture repeatedly says. All is fine and good as long as everything works. But the moment it doesn’t, all that perceived strength will dissolve like sand in a flood.
What will sustain you when you feel the world has turned against you? What will sustain you when your loving spouse descends into dementia? What will sustain you when health problems become overwhelming as you age? What will sustain you raising kids on your own brings you nearly to despair? What will sustain you when people you loved your whole life begin to pass away? What will sustain you when your congregation falls into conflict? What will sustain you if another world cataclysm like Covid comes again? Will you be like millions of your fellow Christians and abandon your faith because you think it doesn’t work? Will you give into fear and anger and all the spiritual illness it leads to?
The widow’s faith was such that, despite the dark valley she found herself in, she continued to believe that God would come through for her and for the broken world that had so abused her. She had no desire for revolution or reprisals against those who victimized her. She simply continued to believe that God heard and cared about her, and she was ready to wait until he acted.
Whenever Jesus says, “Your faith has saved you” or “Your faith has made you well”, it is always in response to the demonstration of some remarkably passionate faith. The friends who believe so passionately in Jesus that they cut a whole in the roof of a house to lower their paralytic friend to Jesus for healing. His sins were forgiven not for his own faith, but for the passionate faith of his friends. The centurion who compared his own authority over soldiers to Jesus’ authority over the unseen forces behind his son’s illness demonstrated a passionate faith. The Syro-Phoenician woman who was willing to suffer any indignity for the sake of God’s mercy demonstrated a passionate faith. The insistent Bartimaeus was healed because he risked his own life to declare Jesus the Son of David, demonstrating a passionate faith.
On the other hand, lukewarm faith is useless. The rich man had enough faith to live his life according to the commandments, and the blessings of his riches supported his conviction of his own righteousness. But when Jesus asked him to demonstrate a passionate faith by selling his excess and sharing it with those in need, he doesn’t have the faith to rise to Jesus’ challenge.
Jesus’ neighbors in Nazareth went to synagogue, listened to the scriptures and knew all about God’s identity, but their faith was insufficient to get past the familiarity of Jesus, and he was therefore unable to help any of them.
The disciples themselves were stumped by Jesus’ demand that they feed the five thousand, because they failed to believe that God was a bottomless fount of abundance. Thereafter the authority Jesus had granted to them was rescinded, and they could no longer even cast a demon out of a child. They would go on to abandon Jesus at his deepest hour of need, and one of them would deny him, not once but three times.
A passionate faith doesn’t necessarily look any certain way. It’s a faith that responds to be good and evil, justice and injustice, with abundant trust in God and an inner commitment to peace and love with God and the rest of humanity. As I close, I’ll give you an example:
A pastor asked an older farmer, decked out in bib overalls, to say grace for the morning breakfast.
“Lord, I hate buttermilk”, the farmer began. The visiting pastor opened one eye to glance at the farmer and wonder where this was going.
The farmer loudly proclaimed, “Lord, I hate lard.” Now the pastor was growing concerned.
Without missing a beat, the farmer continued, “And Lord, you know I don’t much care for raw white flour”. The pastor once again opened an eye to glance around the room and saw that he wasn’t the only one to feel uncomfortable.
Then the farmer added, “But Lord, when you mix them all together and bake them, I do love warm fresh biscuits. So Lord, when things come up that we don’t like, when life gets hard, when we don’t understand what you’re saying to us, help us to just relax and wait until you are done mixing. It will probably be even better than biscuits.”
Amen.
The issue, as is often the case with Jesus, was economics. The temple had become a racket. The religious leaders of that time, like the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century, created theologies out of whole cloth that commended and defended the rich and powerful and excoriated and burdened the poor and powerless. So Jesus began his visit to Jerusalem that Passover week with a powerful demonstration: he drove the moneychangers and merchants out of the temple, drying up the money faucet.
Mark tells us that Jesus’ crowds were delighted. The popularity of Jesus’ critique of temple corruption was tremendously threatening to the rich religious elite, just as the popularity Martin Luther’s 99 Theses were a threat to the riches of the Roman Catholic Church.
This is an ancient sin of Israel, beginning with the drunken worship of the golden calf. Biblically, the worship of money, and the oppression it causes, always ended in disaster. Greed and oppression of the poor led to the fall of Israel and the fall of Judah, as is reported in literally just about every prophet we have.
Scribes were often appointed by males to be the executor of their wills, leaving their widows unrepresented legally. Like some shady lawyers do today, those scribes could twist the law to cheat the widow out of her inheritance, leaving her with nothing.
And right on cue, such a widow arrives at the temple. Jesus notices how easily the wealthy drop large sums in the temple, which of course would earn them social capital. The widow, on the other hand, has been so impoverished she has only a couple of pennies to give.
And she chooses to give them both.
She who was victimized by her own religious establishment, she who was left with nothing but a few pennies, she who could not be blamed for turning her back on God, nevertheless continued to believe, continued to turn her whole life over to the care of God.
Jesus is not saying that poor people should give up what little they have to God. Nor does this anecdote imply that a bunch of retired people living on fixed incomes should impoverish themselves to support the church.
This is not really a passage about stewardship. It’s about the power of passionate faith to sustain those who suffer injustice, who leave God’s justice in God’s hands, who are able to maintain shalom: peace with God, with their neighbors, and even with their oppressors.
Turn the other cheek. Pray for your enemies. Be generous with your excess to anyone who asks. Love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself, and the Spirit of God will leave that obsolete temple and enter into your very heart. You will enter the kingdom of God.
We may find it hard to identify with the widow. We in America enjoy a quality of life high above many countries around the world, but this does not mean that everyone doesn’t experience unfairness at some time or another. Jesus came preaching a way to maintain peace in those moments, a way to sustain a living faith even when you feel God has abandoned you, because he rightly saw a terrible crisis on the horizon, the destruction and fall of the Jewish religious state, together with its all-important temple.
Jesus spoke about building a house on rock versus building a rock on sand, given the expectation of a flood. The worship of idols like money and power was the building of sandcastles, as Scripture repeatedly says. All is fine and good as long as everything works. But the moment it doesn’t, all that perceived strength will dissolve like sand in a flood.
What will sustain you when you feel the world has turned against you? What will sustain you when your loving spouse descends into dementia? What will sustain you when health problems become overwhelming as you age? What will sustain you raising kids on your own brings you nearly to despair? What will sustain you when people you loved your whole life begin to pass away? What will sustain you when your congregation falls into conflict? What will sustain you if another world cataclysm like Covid comes again? Will you be like millions of your fellow Christians and abandon your faith because you think it doesn’t work? Will you give into fear and anger and all the spiritual illness it leads to?
The widow’s faith was such that, despite the dark valley she found herself in, she continued to believe that God would come through for her and for the broken world that had so abused her. She had no desire for revolution or reprisals against those who victimized her. She simply continued to believe that God heard and cared about her, and she was ready to wait until he acted.
Whenever Jesus says, “Your faith has saved you” or “Your faith has made you well”, it is always in response to the demonstration of some remarkably passionate faith. The friends who believe so passionately in Jesus that they cut a whole in the roof of a house to lower their paralytic friend to Jesus for healing. His sins were forgiven not for his own faith, but for the passionate faith of his friends. The centurion who compared his own authority over soldiers to Jesus’ authority over the unseen forces behind his son’s illness demonstrated a passionate faith. The Syro-Phoenician woman who was willing to suffer any indignity for the sake of God’s mercy demonstrated a passionate faith. The insistent Bartimaeus was healed because he risked his own life to declare Jesus the Son of David, demonstrating a passionate faith.
On the other hand, lukewarm faith is useless. The rich man had enough faith to live his life according to the commandments, and the blessings of his riches supported his conviction of his own righteousness. But when Jesus asked him to demonstrate a passionate faith by selling his excess and sharing it with those in need, he doesn’t have the faith to rise to Jesus’ challenge.
Jesus’ neighbors in Nazareth went to synagogue, listened to the scriptures and knew all about God’s identity, but their faith was insufficient to get past the familiarity of Jesus, and he was therefore unable to help any of them.
The disciples themselves were stumped by Jesus’ demand that they feed the five thousand, because they failed to believe that God was a bottomless fount of abundance. Thereafter the authority Jesus had granted to them was rescinded, and they could no longer even cast a demon out of a child. They would go on to abandon Jesus at his deepest hour of need, and one of them would deny him, not once but three times.
A passionate faith doesn’t necessarily look any certain way. It’s a faith that responds to be good and evil, justice and injustice, with abundant trust in God and an inner commitment to peace and love with God and the rest of humanity. As I close, I’ll give you an example:
A pastor asked an older farmer, decked out in bib overalls, to say grace for the morning breakfast.
“Lord, I hate buttermilk”, the farmer began. The visiting pastor opened one eye to glance at the farmer and wonder where this was going.
The farmer loudly proclaimed, “Lord, I hate lard.” Now the pastor was growing concerned.
Without missing a beat, the farmer continued, “And Lord, you know I don’t much care for raw white flour”. The pastor once again opened an eye to glance around the room and saw that he wasn’t the only one to feel uncomfortable.
Then the farmer added, “But Lord, when you mix them all together and bake them, I do love warm fresh biscuits. So Lord, when things come up that we don’t like, when life gets hard, when we don’t understand what you’re saying to us, help us to just relax and wait until you are done mixing. It will probably be even better than biscuits.”
Amen.
