“Riches Hidden in Poverty” Mount Olive Lutheran Church Season of Pentecost Sunday Sermon November 10, 2024 – Mark 12:38–44

Mount Olive Lutheran Church / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Sunday November 10th 2024: Season of Pentecost / Mark 12:38–44 “Riches Hidden in Poverty”

And in His teaching [Jesus] said, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes and like greetings in the marketplaces and have the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts, who devour widows’ houses and for a pretense make long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”

And He sat down opposite the treasury and watched the people putting money into the offering box. Many rich people put in large sums. And a poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which make a penny. And He called His disciples to Him and said to them, “Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the offering box. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in Your sight O Lord. Amen.

Grace peace and mercy to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Good Christian Friends a widow has faced death. A widow is only a widow because her husband has died. In the ancient world widows were even more vulnerable that they are today. If their husband left them a large estate with a lot of money and a young family then there would be men who would come about looking to marry her for her land and money. If she was young and attractive there would be men who would want to take advantage of that too. If she had sons and they were old enough she would be better cared for, if the sons were good sons; if she had even one good son, than she would be well cared for. To be a widow in poverty would require having lost her husband and for there to be no money, no property and no children to care for her. Then she would be truly poor. The widow with only one child, with only one son, would also be less open to having her son or child go to war, or to work in dangerous conditions, because if they died what would become of her?

When Jesus, sees a poor widow putting two small copper coins which make a penny into the offering box, saying to His disciples, “Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the offering box. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on,” Jesus is implying that this widow has no son of her own to care for her needs. There’s no money coming from her natural born children, she simply gave out of her poverty trusting that the Lord would provide for her.

In our Old Testament reading[1] we hear the widow of Zarephath say to Elijah who had called out to her asking for water and a morsel of bread, “As the LORD your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a jug. And now I am gathering a couple of sticks that I may go in and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it and die.” They were experiencing drought, no rains from the heavens, no food from the field,[2] there was nothing left for the widow and her son but the yawning open mouth of the grave. Elijah promises her that she would nevertheless be cared for by the Lord and trusting Elijah’s word to her the widow of Zarephath gave him what he asked for out of her extreme poverty and we are told in the Book of 1 Kings that “the [widow’s] jar of flour was not spent, neither did [her] jug of oil become empty, according to the word of the LORD that He spoke [to her] by Elijah.”          

Tomorrow is Remembrance Day the day we remember the end of the First World War. The fighting ended “at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month” of 1918, following the signing of the armistice agreement with Germany. Over the years Remembrance Day has grown to embrace the remembrance of the fallen soldiers and veterans from the wars that preceded and followed the First World War. And that war, and the others, produced widows and in other cases created widows with dead sons. The widow who watched her sons go to war, with no promise of their safe return would fear for her own security and wellbeing, she would however have the Lord to turn to in her distress. Perhaps your own family faced this hardship: death and the devil prowling around your home seeking for a chance to eat up your family’s wealth and prospects; seeking a chance to get their icy fingers on everything that you held dear, and anything that the Lord had given your family to support this body and life.[3] Historically the widow whose sons march off to war gives them away to the cause, and she’s left with the prospect of poverty and death. How much harder when it is her eldest son, and how much harder still if it’s her only son.     

When Jesus sits with His disciples across from the offering box of the Temple Treasury and watches the widow come with her two small copper coins as an offering, this is happening during Holy Week, the week leading up to His cross and passion. We are not told if the widow in our Gospel had ever met Jesus, or if she knew Him in any way, we don’t know if she was in the crowd that greeted Him the first day of that week as He rode into town to loud shouts of Hosanna, “Save us! Save me now!”[4] We don’t even know if she noticed Jesus and the disciples watching her as she gave her offering. We don’t know what she was doing on the Friday of that week. But we do know that by Friday of that week Jesus would be high and lifted up upon the cross of His crucifixion for all the people of Jerusalem to see[5] and another widow would stand at His feet look up at Him in anguish. That widow was the Virgin Mary, Jesus’ mother, watching her Son go off to die in a War with Sin Death the Devil and the World. The solider of the cross, arms stretched out, naked, bleeding, dying, beaten, treated in a way no mother would ever want to see her son treated: The heartbreaking image of suffering beyond imagination. The wooden beams of the cross were gathered together and Jesus was nailed to them and her future was nail to them there too. Would she soon die with her Son?

The widow Mary, the Virgin Mary, had three things to hold onto 1) her God given gift of faith 2) Jesus promise “that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again,”[6] and 3) Jesus’ arrangements to have her cared for when He saw His mother and the disciple whom He loved standing nearby, and he said to His mother, “Woman, behold, your son!,” [referring to the disciple Saint John and then saying to John], “Behold, your mother!” And [Saint John tells us in his Gospel] from that hour [the disciple, this same Saint John,] took her to his own home.[7]

You don’t need to be a widow to learn from all of this. When you read a bit further in 1 Kings you find that the widow does lose her son to death but through the prophet Elijah God raises that son back to life.[8] The Virgin Mary weeping at the foot of the cross does lose her firstborn Son Jesus to death but three days later God the Father gives her Son back to her, only now that Son is no longer just her baby boy but revealed to truly be the Saviour of the World, “the firstborn of the dead.”[9] The Christian mother, the Christian widow who loses her Christian sons and daughters to war will receive them back in The Resurrection of Dead on The Last Day[10] where she and they will drink from “the spring of the water of life without payment.”[11] In that place there will be no lack, and no poverty of any kind. At the cross we have riches hidden in poverty, promised to us, unlike anything the World can understand.  

When we are tempted to count our pennies in fear of the future, and not count them in gratitude for the gift, we are in danger of losing our trust in the Lord: same too when we count our family in this way. In the examples we have received from Scripture today we have been given accounts of people who had everything taken from them, or were in danger of losing everything and they didn’t fall into the temptation of caring for themselves first, rather they trusted the Lord to care for them. They didn’t stubbornly insist that they knew better what was coming to them, they didn’t override the promises of the Lord replacing it with their own desires, with what they thought was possible. No they trusted that the Lord would provide. Look back upon your life and consider the times you thought all was lost and then the Lord in His great mercy provided for your needs? Remember those times and remember those the Lord moved to generosity to care for you in your times of need. Lastly if you are in a position to care for others, do it. Care for those in your family that have needs, especially the widows, and remember the Church is called to care for the true widows in their midst, the ones without sons or daughters or family of their own to look out for them. If you want to read a bit more about this, in the life of the Church and in our Christian life in general, check out what Saint Paul teaches Saint Timothy regarding widows in 1 Timothy 5:1-17.      

And finally if, on the one hand, you have failed to trust in the Lord for fear of poverty and death, if you have been stingy with what the Lord has provided you, if you have been greedy of what the Lord has provided others, covetous of that, if you have failed to care for the needs of others remember Jesus: In death He was the picture of poverty and yet He put into your salvation everything He had, His sinlessness, His love, His faith and trust. Because He was willing and able to give up everything for you, and now by the grace of God you are now able to have everything and more poured out upon you in abundance in this life and in its full completeness in the Life which is to come. God the Father didn’t hold back His only Son when you were in need of Salvation, in Jesus He gave everything for your salvation, “For God loved the world in this way, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”[12] Last week we heard Jesus teach, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,”[13] trust Him at His Word. Amen.    

Let us pray: Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us, Lord have mercy on us, “take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, take our hearts and set them on fire; for the sake of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Amen.

[1] 1 Kings 17:8-16
[2] 1 Kings 17-18; James 5:17-18
[3] First Article, Explanation, Creed, Luther’s Small Catechism, Concordia Publishing House 2017, page
[4] Mark 11:8-10
[5] John 12:32
[6] Mark 8:31
[7] John 19:26–27
[8] 1 Kings 17:17-24
[9] Revelation 1:5
[10] Hebrews 9:28
[11] Revelation 21:6
[12] John 3:16
[13] Matthew 5:3–4

Photo Credit: Main photo of The Widow's Mite (Le denier de la veuve), 1886–1894 by James Tissot from brooklynmuseum.